Microsoft Slashes Copilot Prices for Its Biggest Buyers as a Super App Looms

Microsoft will cut Copilot subscription prices by up to half for its largest corporate customers starting in October, the same week it's rolling out a unified Copilot super app packed with coding tools and autonomous agents.

Fifteen million people already pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot. On September 22, Microsoft decided the price wasn't low enough to land the next fifteen million.

The company announced enterprise discounts of 30% for customers buying between 1,000 and 10,000 seats, rising to 50% for anyone committing to more than 10,000, according to a report from Bloomberg. That's a real discount, not a rounding error. The cuts take effect in October and apply against Copilot's standard list price of $30 per user per month, a number that hasn't moved since the product launched. For a 10,000-seat customer, that's the difference between a $3.6 million annual bill and one closer to $1.8 million.

There's a catch, and it's the interesting part. Microsoft is tying the bigger discounts to customers who also commit to usage-based fees on top of their seats. The company built exactly that metering system this year: Copilot Credits, priced at one cent each, now bill separately for tasks run through Copilot Cowork, which went generally available in June. Buy seats cheap, pay for what you actually run. That's the new math.

The timing isn't an accident. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed the unified app plan on the company's fiscal Q4 earnings call on July 29, telling investors Microsoft now has over 30 million paid Microsoft 365 Copilot seats with net seat adds more than doubling quarter over quarter. The plan folds Copilot Chat, Copilot Code, Cowork and the company's Autopilot agents into a single app, targeted for general availability by the end of October, the same month the new pricing kicks in. Microsoft Scout, an always-on agent layer, is also expected to join the bundle.

Think of it as Microsoft trying to become the one app an employee opens for everything AI touches: drafting a memo, debugging a pull request, or handing a multi-step task to an agent that works in the background while you're in a meeting. That's a genuinely different pitch than a chatbot bolted onto Word.

It also explains the discount. A cheaper seat price is a land grab. Microsoft wants Copilot installed everywhere before employees form habits around a competitor's assistant, and it's willing to trade per-seat margin to get there.

Everyone is placing a different bet on how AI gets billed

The competition isn't sitting still. Google renamed its Agentspace platform to Gemini Enterprise last October, and the Standard edition now runs $30 a month per user on a 12-month commitment, or $35 without one, as a standalone platform that doesn't require a Workspace subscription at all. Anthropic has gone a different route: Claude Enterprise lists at $20 per user per month plus usage billed at API rates, according to Anthropic's own pricing page. In April, Anthropic pushed Claude Managed Agents into public beta and took Claude Cowork to general availability, with early production users including Notion, Asana and Sentry.

So you've got three different bets on the table. Google sells a permission-aware search and agent layer that sits outside your existing software stack. Anthropic keeps its seat price low and expects usage billing to do the real work. Microsoft is cutting its entry price and hoping the credits make up the difference later. None of these are wrong, exactly. They're just different answers to the same unresolved question: is enterprise AI a subscription business or a metering business?

Frankly, Microsoft's answer tells you something about where it thinks the real money sits. A $30 seat that a company barely uses is worth less to Microsoft than a discounted seat attached to a credit meter that runs hot every time an employee hands a task to an agent. Seat count gets you into the building. Usage is what pays the rent.

That's also the risk. If the super app doesn't give employees a reason to actually run agentic tasks through it, the discounted seats become exactly what critics of enterprise AI have warned about for two years now: a line item nobody uses, purchased because procurement got a good price. Microsoft has 15 million seats sold. Whether it can turn a meaningful share of them into paying, metered usage is the number that actually decides if this bet was smart.

Also read: Qualcomm's New Snapdragon Chip Runs a 30 Billion Parameter AI With No Cloud • OpenAI's AI Agent Hacked Australia's Medicare Portal in June • The Vatican's Top AI Adviser Accuses Big Tech Labs of Running a Cartel

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