Three out of four small firms that buy Copilot through a Microsoft reseller have no Azure account, by Microsoft’s own count. From December 1 the checkout makes one for them, with the meter running. If you’re buying Copilot Business seats through a reseller after that date, don’t sign until you’ve asked what the spending limit is. Here’s what Microsoft’s own pages say, read this morning:
- New Copilot Business seats bought through a reseller come with usage billing switched on. Microsoft moved the date from November 2 to December 1.
- The default limit is 4,000 credits a user a month. On Microsoft’s own pay-as-you-go example, a credit is a cent.
- Adding a seat to a subscription you already have turns it on for the whole company.
- You can lower the limit, but Microsoft’s admin page won’t let you set a per-user budget under 2,000 credits.
Every write-up I found this week stops at the first two points and tells you to lower the limit. None of them says there’s a floor under it, and none says that one extra seat flips the switch for everyone you already have. Both are on Microsoft’s pages, and that’s the part worth your time.
The Line the Resellers Got and You Didn’t
The announcement went out to partners, in the Partner Center, on October 1. Microsoft’s October announcements page says it plainly: “Starting December 1, 2026, usage-based billing will be enabled by default for new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licenses purchased in Cloud Solution Provider (CSP).” A Cloud Solution Provider is the reseller most small firms buy Microsoft from. The same page gives the default: “4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month, which can be adjusted by admins.”
What’s a credit worth? Microsoft’s pricing pages don’t put the rate next to the announcement. The nearest thing I found is a worked example on Microsoft’s own pre-purchase page, dated July 17, which says “Assuming the pay-as-you-go rate for Copilot Credit to be $0.01”. Resellers quote the same cent. So I did the arithmetic the announcement leaves out.
| What Microsoft set | Credits | At one cent a credit | Where it’s written |
|---|---|---|---|
| Default limit per user, per month | 4,000 | $40 | Partner Center announcement, October 1 |
| Lowest per-user budget the admin page accepts | 2,000 | $20 | Microsoft Learn, updated October 28 |
| Default limit for the whole company | 1,200,000 | $12,000 | Partner Center pricing page, October 9 |
| Microsoft’s own example, 100 users | 400,000 | $4,000 | Partner Center announcement, October 1 |
That company-wide default is 300 users at 4,000 each, and 300 is the seat cap on Copilot Business. So the default is “everyone, at the top.” These are ceilings, and Microsoft says charges follow actual use. A quiet office might spend nothing. But a ceiling you didn’t pick is still your ceiling.
The Floor Nobody Mentions
Here’s the sentence that changed my read. Microsoft’s admin guide for these spending policies, updated October 28, says under “Set limits and alerts”:
Monthly budget limit for users: Set at least 2,000 credits per user per month. […] To help ensure a good user experience, your policy must meet the minimum.
So the advice going around, “just lower the limit”, runs into a wall at twenty dollars a head. Want it lower? Microsoft’s partner pricing page says: “Usage-based billing can’t be fully turned off once configured. Instead, partners set the applicable spending limit to zero.” Two paragraphs later the same page says: “You can’t reduce a policy’s limit below the platform minimum. Deleting the policy is the only way to stop spend entirely.”
Those two sentences don’t agree with each other, and I can’t tell you which one the admin screen will enforce on December 1. One source says zero, the same source says delete. I haven’t seen the screen. The partner FAQ is a download behind a partner login, and I couldn’t open it this morning. If your reseller can, ask them for the page that settles it.
One Seat Flips It for Everyone
This is the quiet one. The partner pricing page lists what turns usage billing on. New purchases, yes. Also this: “Adding seats to existing Copilot Business subscription: UBB is enabled with default spending policy values, but only for adding seats through the partner center portal.”
So you’ve had Copilot seats since spring with no usage billing. You hire one person in December. Your reseller adds a seat in their portal. The company now has a spending policy at 4,000 credits a user, for every user, and a new Azure account to bill it to. Microsoft even warns partners about the confusion that follows: “partners might see consumption charges appear for a tenant even when only a subset of seats generated the triggering purchase event.”
Who in your office would notice that line on an Azure invoice? Does anyone there read Azure invoices at all?
Two more defaults sit under this one. The policy auto-adds future Microsoft agents and services as they launch, the overview page says that toggle is “enabled by default”. And when two policies cover the same person, “the least-restrictive policy wins.” So a tight policy you set up for the sales team loses to a loose default one that covers all users.
What to Do Before December 1
Three things, and none needs a consultant.
First, if you already have Copilot Business, write down today whether usage billing is on. Your admin can look in the Microsoft 365 admin center under Copilot, then Cost Management. If it’s off, a seat added after December 1 is what will turn it on.
Second, decide your number before the reseller does. If the floor holds, your real choices are a budget between 2,000 credits and whatever you’d stand for, or no policy at all. Tell the reseller which, in writing, before the order.
Third, turn off auto-apply for new services on whatever policy you keep, and set the alert emails to a person who reads them. Microsoft’s own guide says when users hit the limit “they lose access to agents and services for the rest of the month.” That’s the other half of a ceiling: it’s also a shutoff, and your people will find out on a Tuesday afternoon.
I don’t know yet how often a normal office actually hits 4,000 credits. Microsoft publishes an estimator, and I haven’t run a real month through it. When I have, I’ll say so.
The Other Cheap Shared Model This Week
A smaller story, same lesson. Cloudflare said on October 26 that one of its shared AI models, GLM 5.3 on Workers AI, handed back pieces of other customers’ answers. Cloudflare’s post says 155 responses were affected between August 27 and September 9, and found “no evidence of deliberate exploitation.”
The cause is the kind of thing you’d never see from the outside. The model advertised room for about a million tokens of text per request. The memory behind it was sized for about 680,000. Send a prompt bigger than that, and a software bug served you leftovers from the person before you.
A token is roughly three quarters of a word, so that’s a very long document, a contract bundle or a year of email. If your team pastes big files into a cheap shared model, this is the failure to ask your vendor about: what happens when my request is bigger than your cache?
Cloudflare fixed it the same day it found it. The question for you isn’t Cloudflare. It’s whether anyone at your company knows which shared model your tools call.
If you’d rather have someone read your reseller’s order with you before you sign, send me the one line that worries you. One is enough.