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Public story · 2026-09-20 · high
The billing reaches back to agents built before August 3, including ones sitting in trial and dev environments.
Why now: Microsoft's grace period, which started September 1, ended September 15, and Modern Workspace Pro's post surfaced the change on September 17.
Microsoft turned on usage-based billing for GitHub Copilot harness agents and workflows in Copilot Studio on September 15, per Modern Workspace Pro's post. The change, tracked as message center item MC1461678, ended a grace period that had run since September 1.
Anyone who built or ran a harness agent in that window, or earlier, now owes credits for it.
Both sides of the meter count. Authoring a maker agent spends Copilot Credits, and so does every runtime execution. The billing reaches back to agents built before August 3, including ones sitting in Dev and Trial environments. A team may have spun those up to test the feature and forgotten they existed.
Standard harness agents and Copilot Chat harness agents are exempt. The charge is specific to the GitHub Copilot harness inside Copilot Studio.
A trial environment used to mean no bill. This notice erases that assumption for one harness type. A team that never got budget approval for Copilot Credits can end up with a live charge attached to a prototype nobody remembers greenlighting.
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