thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Usage-Based Pricing for Copilot Is Good for Microsoft’s Investors. Read That Sentence Again.

Usage-Based Pricing for Copilot Is Good for Microsoft’s Investors. Read That Sentence Again.

by | Jun 20, 2026 | Blog |

TheStreet ran a piece this week arguing that, of Microsoft’s two Copilot announcements, the shift to usage-based pricing matters more to investors than the DeepSeek flirtation. That read is correct. It is also the tell. Here is what Microsoft actually did. Copilot Cowork, the agent that reaches across Microsoft 365 to run multi-step work on your data, is coming off the flat per-seat add-on and moving onto consumption billing the company calls “Copilot Credits.” Charles Lamanna, who runs Copilot, told Axios the product could not be offered on an unlimited-use basis. The users he pointed to are the ones doing hundreds of tasks a week. He called them “way productive.” And then he said the part vendors normally keep off the slide: their costs go very high. So the most productive users are the expensive ones. Hold that thought, because the whole argument lives there. What “good for investors” is really saying A pricing model earns the label “good for investors” when three things are true. Revenue starts to track cost-to-serve. Revenue scales with consumption instead of sitting flat per seat. And the vendor stops eating the margin on its heaviest users. All three are true here. None of them is a statement about whether a customer got value. That is the gap I want to sit in for a minute. Usage-based pricing meters an input. Tokens, compute, credits, whatever the unit. The customer does not buy tokens because they want tokens. They want a finished report, a resolved ticket, a reconciled spreadsheet. The token count is the cost of producing the outcome, not the outcome. And the relationship...