AI Isn’t Free Anymore—Copilot’s New Limits Say So

Microsoft is changing how access limits for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat work.

Instead of metered usage for the free service, users will now be broken down into Priority (fully licensed) and Standard (no M365 Copilot license) access, with the potential for in product messages if requests exceed service capacity.

Of course, there must be a technical capacity limit for services like Copilot as we know each request does consume a not insignificant level of resources. And of course, those users who have a paid license must be prioritized.

But imagine if users with Microsoft 365 Business Standard hit up against a hard limit once Microsoft Bookings had added 20 appointments to their calendar in the month, and they got a helpful message to remind them they could upgrade to Business Premium. Or how about a message from SharePoint offering the suggestion to try again in 5 minutes to access your files? This is a completely new way of thinking about the billing of SaaS services.

All the signs point to us getting toward the end of the all-you-can-eat party of these early days of generative AI, or at least the end of $30 or thereabouts being the right anchor price to make the business of running AI services make sense for providers.

As yet, Microsoft has not jumped into the $200/mo AI service tier game that others like OpenAI and Anthropic have initiated. However, how long until a more premium Copilot tier is added to the equation? If only the product name "Copilot Pro" hadn't been used already.

It makes perfect sense that Microsoft and others are trying out different approaches on how to measure and message AI tool consumption and capacity limits. It's important that those who are specifically paying for AI understand the value of that purchase, and those who are absorbing capacity on free tiers have some impetus to upgrade. This is a set of products where the issue of how we pay for them is still waiting for maturity, and I think it's likely we'll continue to see changes both in the message and the way capacity limits work before we reach a happy balance.

For information on this change and timelines see Microsoft 365 message center message MC1117101.

Posted on Linkedin on 24/07/2025 -> View Linkedin post here