Microsoft Copilot's real team bill, and the open-source alternative

The three lines on a Copilot bill

A Copilot quote arrives as one number per person. Microsoft's own pages carry three separate charges behind that number, and a team pays all three.

The seat is the line everyone quotes. Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot lists at $23.50 per user a month when paid yearly, and $28.20 on monthly billing. Business Premium with Copilot lists at $32.00 and $38.40 (Microsoft Copilot business pricing, read 21 October 2026). The Copilot Business add-on lists at $21.00 a month paid yearly, or $25.20 monthly, for a team that already owns Microsoft 365. A first-year promotion takes it to $18.00 until 31 December 2026.

The base plan is easier to miss. Microsoft sells that add-on only on top of an eligible Microsoft 365 plan. Microsoft Learn names the eligible families: Business Premium, Business Standard, Business Basic, Apps for Business and Teams Essentials. It also caps Copilot Business at 300 seats per tenant (Copilot plan options, read 21 October 2026). A larger organization moves to the enterprise add-on at $30.00 per user a month, paid yearly, again on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan (enterprise pricing, read 21 October 2026).

The meter is the line nobody budgets. A Copilot seat includes chat and Copilot inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. Hand-off work does not sit inside the seat. Microsoft bills Copilot Cowork, Copilot Code, Autopilot and the Work IQ APIs on Copilot Credits, and says more usage-based services may follow. Copilot Studio, the agent builder, sells in tenant-wide packs of 25,000 credits at $200.00 a month. The pay-as-you-go meter needs an Azure subscription (Copilot Studio pricing, read 21 October 2026). Publishing an agent to a website, an app or a social channel takes a standalone Studio plan, not the Studio harness that arrives with a Copilot seat.

A 50-person team, priced line by line

Take a 50-person company buying Business Standard with Copilot and publishing one customer-facing agent. Every number below is a published price, and every sum is shown.

• Seats: 50 × $23.50 = $1,175.00 a month.
• Studio pack: 1 × $200.00 = $200.00 a month, for 25,000 Copilot Credits.
• Metered Cowork, Code and Autopilot work: $0.00 in this example, because none is handed off. Any use adds a line at Microsoft's credit rate.

The total is $1,175.00 + $200.00 = $1,375.00 a month. Divided by the 50 seats, that is $27.50 per seat ($1,375.00 ÷ 50). Over a year, $1,375.00 × 12 = $16,500.00.

Now price the usage honestly. If 35 of the 50 people open Copilot in a given month, the same $1,375.00 works out at $39.29 per active person ($1,375.00 ÷ 35). The 15 people who never sign in still hold a seat, and their share is 15 × $23.50 = $352.50 a month.

The promotional price holds for one year and then steps up. Fifty add-on seats at $18.00 come to $900.00 a month. At the standard $21.00 the same seats come to $1,050.00, so year two adds $150.00 a month, which is $1,800.00 a year.

The enterprise route lands higher again. Fifty seats at $30.00 come to $1,500.00, plus the $200.00 Studio pack, for $1,700.00 a month, or $34.00 per seat.

Where a Copilot bill moves after signature

Three controls decide what the bill looks like twelve months later, and none of them is the headline price.

The annual commitment is the first. Microsoft sells the Business add-on on an annual commitment. The same seat costs more month to month: $25.20 against $21.00, and $28.20 against $23.50 for Business Standard with Copilot. Paying monthly buys flexibility at a premium of roughly 20% on the seat.

The 300-seat ceiling is the second. Copilot Business is sold to organizations up to 300 seats, so the quarter a company crosses that line, the Copilot line reprices from $21.00 to $30.00 per seat. On 320 seats that step is 320 × $9.00 = $2,880.00 a month.

Idle seats are the third, and the quietest. A seat bills whether or not anyone uses it. Ten seats assigned to people who never open Copilot cost 10 × $23.50 = $235.00 a month, or $2,820.00 a year, for no work done. Only the credit meter follows real usage.

What the same 50 people cost on a self-hosted open-source stack

Kortix prices agent work on credits, not seats. The paid plan runs in 25 tiers from $50 a month (5,000 credits) to $50,000 a month (5,000,000 credits), at 100 credits per dollar. Members are free, and the account shares one credit pool (Kortix pricing, read 21 October 2026).

The unit is published on the same page. One credit is $0.01, and 11 credits buy an hour of agent computer. That machine is 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 20 GB, bills per second, and costs nothing while it is stopped. The $200.00 tier carries 20,000 credits, which the page puts at about 1,830 agent-computer hours a month.

Run the same team through it. Thirty-five people working with agents 10 hours a month is 35 × 10 = 350 agent-computer hours. At 11 credits an hour that is 350 × 11 = 3,850 credits. At $0.01 a credit, the computer time comes to 3,850 × $0.01 = $38.50. The tier that covers it starts at $50.00 a month, or $1.43 per active person ($50.00 ÷ 35).

Model spend sits beside that line, and the page is explicit about where it goes. With your own provider keys, usage bills straight to the provider and the first $1,000 a month is free, after which Kortix adds 5% paid from credits. A ChatGPT subscription connected to the account spends no credits at all. Kortix-managed models bill at the provider's base price plus 5.5%, also from credits.

Hosting is the last variable. Kortix runs on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free, so a team that already owns servers pays only for the machines it runs.

Set the two bills side by side. $1,375.00 − $38.50 = $1,336.50 a month of difference before model spend, on a team where a third of the seats are idle.

Both bills are real, and they buy different things. The Microsoft invoice covers Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and 1 TB of OneDrive per seat as well as the assistant. The Kortix line covers agent work alone. A company already paying for Microsoft 365 should compare the Copilot increment against the Kortix line, not the whole invoice. The increment is $21.00 a seat, or $18.00 in the first year.

How to choose between the two

The decision turns on where the work happens, and the arithmetic makes it visible.

Keep the Copilot seats if the work lives inside Word, Excel and Outlook, and the assistant is a convenience inside those apps. Buy the bundle rather than a base plan plus a separate add-on. $23.50 for Business Standard with Copilot is the published price of both, and the add-on alone is $21.00 on a plan you pay for anyway.

Cut the seat count to the people who use it. A 50-seat purchase for 35 active people carries $352.50 a month of idle seats, and reassigning seats to new joiners is an admin task, not a saving.

Run the agents on Kortix where the deliverable is finished work: a report, a deck, a code change, a reply, produced on a cloud computer and reviewed before it lands. That work is metered by the minute the machine runs, not by the number of people on the team. Agents, skills, company memory and tools sit in one git repo you own, and you can read, fork and audit every line of it.