Copilot Business: what it costs, the 30-day trial and how to measure whether it pays off

What is Copilot Business and how does it differ from the free Copilot Chat?

Copilot Business is a paid add-on to Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Business Standard or Business Premium. According to Microsoft's FAQ, it is intended for organisations with up to 300 users, with a maximum of 300 licences per tenant. In substance, it offers the same capabilities as Microsoft 365 Copilot, the version for larger organisations. If you have more than 300 users, Microsoft refers you to that version.

The difference from the free Copilot Chat lies in access to your own work. According to Microsoft, Copilot Chat is available at no extra cost with eligible Microsoft 365 subscriptions. According to the Dutch pricing page, the paid licence adds, among other things, a chat that works with your own work data through Work IQ, reasoning AI for research and data analysis, built-in agents such as Researcher, Analyst and Facilitator, a choice of language models and reporting on usage and impact. Copilot then also works inside the apps themselves, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams.

When comparing pages, pay attention to the name. Microsoft is renaming Microsoft 365 Copilot to Microsoft Copilot and itself says that licences and features may still carry the old name during the transition. In quotations and on pricing pages you may therefore come across different names for the same product.

What does Copilot Business cost per month?

On 7 October 2026, Microsoft's Dutch pricing page listed the following, in each case per user per month and excluding VAT:

• Copilot Business as a standalone add-on: €18.20 on an annual subscription with annual billing, €15.60 with the promotion.
• The same add-on as a monthly subscription: €21.84.
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot Business: €20.36, annual billing.
• Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot Business: €27.73, annual billing.

What conditions come with the promotional price?

The conditions are in a footnote on the same page. The discount applies from 1 July to 31 December 2026 inclusive, requires an annual commitment and applies only to the first year. The subscription then renews automatically. The promotion does not apply to trial subscriptions. There is a seven-day cancellation period with a pro rata refund. So base your sums not only on €15.60, but also on the price for the second year.

Microsoft's own pages are not consistent about the monthly option. The pricing page mentions a monthly subscription of €21.84. The Copilot Business FAQ speaks only of an annual commitment, with monthly or annual billing. Have your partner state on the quotation which form you are getting.

Microsoft briefs its partners in dollars. At the launch on 2 December 2025, Microsoft quoted a price of $21 per user per month. The partner announcement of 1 July 2026 lists $18 after a promotional discount of about 15 percent, extended to the end of December 2026, for 1 to 300 licences on an annual subscription. A new bundle of Business Basic with Copilot Business costs $21 there after a 25 percent discount, likewise to the end of December 2026.

Why do the prices online contradict one another?

Because several promotions ran side by side, with different end dates. On 1 July 2026 Microsoft told partners that the new promotions for Microsoft 365 Copilot would run until 30 September 2026 inclusive. At the same time, the promotion on Copilot Business was extended to 31 December 2026 inclusive. At the launch in December 2025, Microsoft also mentioned a temporarily lower price when bought together with a Microsoft 365 Business subscription, until 30 June 2026. A page that mentions one of those dates may have been right at the time of writing and be out of date now.

There is one more point of uncertainty. On 23 September 2026 Microsoft wrote to partners that the promotions for Microsoft 365 E5, E7 and Copilot would end on 30 September, with the transition to a new margin model for partners. Copilot Business is not mentioned separately there, and the Dutch pricing page still showed the promotion on 7 October. So ask your partner for a written quotation in euros, with the promotional price, the term and the price after the first year.

What is not included in the licence?

The fixed price per user covers everyday work with Copilot in the Office apps and the chat. A growing group of more demanding features is charged separately, per use, in Copilot Credits. Microsoft names, among others, Copilot Cowork, advanced work in SharePoint and OneDrive, the Work IQ API for your own apps and agents, and the Teams Phone Agent. Cowork carries out long-running tasks independently and has been generally available since 16 June 2026. At that launch, Microsoft quoted a price of $0.01 per credit on pay-as-you-go. How many credits a task costs depends on how demanding the task is.

For new Copilot Business licences through a partner, Microsoft will switch pay-as-you-go on by default from 1 December 2026, with a default limit of 4,000 credits per user per month that the administrator can adjust. In that announcement, the Netherlands is listed among the countries where this will not apply initially. If you activate pay-as-you-go yourself, check the spending rules in the admin centre. The setting that automatically brings new services under an existing spending policy is on by default.

And what no licence contains: the choice of which tasks you do with Copilot, the agreements on what may and may not go into it, cleaned-up permissions on your files, and a measurement of what it delivers. That is work for your own organisation. This is precisely where the difference lies between a trial that proves something and a trial that only leaves an impression.

How does the 30-day trial work?

In July 2026 Microsoft introduced Copilot in 30: a 30-day trial of Copilot Business with 25 users, intended for organisations with fewer than 300 employees. The trial runs through a Cloud Solution Provider, a Microsoft partner that supplies licences, and has been available since 1 August 2026. According to the partner announcement of 3 August, it is a limited-time offer that runs until 31 December 2026 inclusive.

The trial comes with a free planning tool, the Copilot Success Planner, which your partner can share with you even before the start. It divides the four weeks by app: Outlook in week 1, Teams and meetings in week 2, Word, Excel and PowerPoint in week 3, and agents in week 4. According to Microsoft, it also includes practical guidance for the evaluation at the end. That is a useful learning path, but the structure follows the apps, not your tasks. What Copilot delivers in your own work only becomes clear if you define those tasks yourself in advance and measure them.

In addition, Microsoft offers a free trial month on its own pricing page. This requires a credit card, and after one month the trial automatically becomes a paid subscription. So put the end date in your diary. For a trial through a partner, ask in writing beforehand what happens on day 31.

How do you measure in 30 days whether Copilot pays off?

Thirty days is short, but enough for a fair comparison if you define in advance what you are comparing. This set-up works for any role and requires no extra software:

• For each role, choose three tasks that recur every week. For a planner, for example, a customer email about a changed delivery time, the minutes of the daily stand-up meeting and the weekly exceptions report. For customer service, a first response to a complaint, a summary of a long email thread for a colleague and adapting a standard letter. For quality, turning an audit report into action points, a non-conformity report in the terminology of your HACCP plan or FSSC 22000 system and preparing the management review.
• Take the baseline measurement in the week before the licences become active. For each task, record how often it occurs, how many minutes it takes, how often something has to be corrected afterwards and who checks the result.
• Use week 1 of the trial to learn, with a short briefing on exactly those tasks. Do not measure anything yet in that week.
• In weeks 2 to 4, do the same tasks with Copilot and measure in the same way. Include the time for checking and correction. Also note when the result was unusable and when a task only existed because Copilot was there. Without that correction, the time saving will be overstated.
• Track adoption in the usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin centre: how many licensed users actually use Copilot and how many prompts they send. By default the report hides users' names. Keep it that way and look at the totals for the trial group, not at individual employees. Adoption is a precondition, not proof of value.
• At the end, do the calculation for each role: net time saved per task multiplied by the number of times per month. Set that against the licence price plus the time that learning took.

Where is the break-even point, and what do earlier trials say?

The break-even point is easy to calculate. Divide the licence price by your internal hourly cost and you know how much net time each user needs to save per month to break even. A worked example, not a measured value: at the promotional price of €15.60 and an hourly cost of €50, that is about nineteen minutes per month. Use your own hourly cost. The question is rarely whether the licence is too expensive. The question is whether the time saving is real and ends up somewhere useful.

That last point is less obvious than it seems. In a UK government trial with 20,000 employees, from 30 September to 31 December 2024 inclusive, users reported an average time saving of 26 minutes per day. The report notes that these are self-reported figures. The UK Department for Business and Trade ran its own pilot with 1,000 licences from October to December 2024 inclusive. The evaluation found small time savings on most tasks, especially writing, but extra time spent on scheduling appointments and creating images. In observed sessions, Copilot users analysed Excel data more slowly and with lower quality and accuracy than non-users. The evaluation found no evidence that the time savings had led to higher productivity.

Both studies concern office work in government. They therefore say little about your planning team or your quality department. They do show why you measure your own tasks rather than adopting an average.

Is Copilot safe for businesses?

In its documentation on data and privacy, Microsoft sets out a number of commitments. Prompts, responses and data that Copilot retrieves through Microsoft Graph are not used to train the underlying language models. For users in the EU, traffic stays within the EU Data Boundary. Copilot Business follows the data policies you have set for your Microsoft 365 environment.

Two caveats matter more for the trial than those commitments. The first: Copilot only shows data that a user is already allowed to see. That also means Copilot can use everything a user is already allowed to see. A folder of complaint files or personnel data that is accidentally open to the whole organisation is easier to find with Copilot. So before day 1, review the permissions on the SharePoint sites, Teams channels and shared folders that your trial users can open. The second: according to Microsoft, Anthropic models available within Copilot currently fall outside the EU Data Boundary. The administrator decides whether those models are switched on. Make that choice deliberately.

This makes Copilot Business a green tool in the sense of our ground rules for ChatGPT and Copilot in the workplace: a business tool within your own tenant. The two basic rules still apply. What you would not email to an outsider does not go into a tool that has not been approved. And AI output is a draft that a human checks. Microsoft itself also writes that Copilot's responses are not guaranteed to be factually correct.

What does the AI Act ask of your employees?

Since 2 February 2025, Article 4 of the AI Act has asked organisations that deploy AI to take measures for the AI literacy of their staff. According to the European Commission, this also applies if you only use general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT or Copilot. Employees must then know, among other things, that such a tool can give incorrect answers. A certificate is not required. An internal record of who has had which training or instruction is sufficient. Since the amendment of the Regulation in July 2026, Article 4 no longer prescribes a specific sufficient level, but the obligation to take measures remains.

For the trial, that means: give the trial users a short briefing on their own tasks before day 1, record who has had it, and include the agreements on checking. You can read more about this in AI literacy is mandatory: what you need to put in place.

After day 30: continue, adjust or stop

Decide role by role, not for the whole organisation. If the measurement shows that planners save net time and quality officers do not, a licence for the planners is a defensible choice and for the rest it is not. Bear in mind that the promotional price requires an annual commitment and applies only to the first year. So factor in the regular price as well.

If you want to convert the outcome into an annual amount, our calculator (in Dutch) can help. If you want to go beyond individual tasks and deploy AI in one established work process with the people who run that process, the page on in-company training explains how we approach that.