“You sneeze and Copilot Cowork charges you.”
A woman said that to me in Seattle. I was running a Copilot workshop for 84 people. She was half joking. Then she said the part that stuck with me. “That’s why we don’t use it much.”
She wasn’t the only one. Someone else in that room told me the same thing.
I like Copilot Cowork a lot. You hand it a real task, it plans the work, does the work, and gives you back something finished. All of it grounded in your company’s own data. It’s some of the best work Microsoft has shipped.
The problem is the meter.
Your Copilot license covers chat and Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Cowork is billed separately in Copilot Credits at a penny each. By Microsoft’s own guidance, a light task uses 70 to 200 credits, a medium one 400 to 600, and a heavy one more than 1,500. That’s a dollar or two on the low end and fifteen dollars and up on the high end. Per task. And you don’t know which one you’re about to get when you hit enter.
Now sit in the user’s seat. Every task spends the company’s money. You can’t tell how much ahead of time. Somebody may ask you about it later. So you do what any reasonable person does. You go back to doing it by hand.
That’s an expense report attached to every prompt. Nobody builds a daily habit out of filing expense reports.
Habits need repetition. Meters kill repetition.
Compare that to my own setup. I pay $100 a month for Claude. It shows me one number, the percentage of my weekly usage I have left. I never think about what a single task costs. I just work. There’s still a limit. But it’s my limit, and it’s simple.
We’ve seen this movie before. Cell phones used to bill by the minute and by the text. People counted minutes, waited until 9 pm to make a call, and got angry at their bills. The carriers moved to buckets and then to unlimited, and usage took off. Nobody counts minutes today.
There’s a book about web design called Don’t Make Me Think. The whole idea is in the title. Every time you make a user stop and think, you lose some of them. A meter makes a user think before every single request.
And the meter is spreading. In late September Microsoft announced Code and Autopilot. Both run on credits too. Starting November 2, new Copilot Business licenses bought through a partner come with pay-as-you-go billing already switched on, with a default limit of $10 per user per month. That’s about two medium tasks.
I get why Microsoft meters this. Agent work costs real compute. But there’s a fix available today, and it sits with the leaders buying these licenses. Give each person a monthly credit budget that belongs to them. Tell them out loud to spend it, and that nobody will question how. Show them what’s left as one simple number.
Microsoft built something people want to use. Right now the price tag is teaching them not to.