Summary
You can now reason about cost as a design lever on the GitHub Copilot harness, weighing the decisions that drive Copilot Credit consumption and working with awareness of how administrators fund and monitor capacity.
What you learned
- Billing is harness-dependent: each harness meters differently and accrues at a different point, and the GitHub Copilot harness is the only one that bills from build time.
- Runtime consumption on the GitHub Copilot harness scales with maker-controlled design decisions: the model powering each task, how much organizational context the agent draws in, how many tools it calls, and task and orchestration complexity.
- On the GitHub Copilot harness, LLM-powered creation, Preview, and evaluation all consume credits before publish while manual Build configuration doesn't, and the consumption you observe in Preview and evaluation gives a directional read on production cost.
- Copilot Credits pool at the tenant, are funded through pay-as-you-go or prepaid capacity, and are governed across the Power Platform admin center and the Microsoft 365 admin center.