Microsoft just made it easier to manage your Pay-As-You-Go services in Microsoft 365—with new features like departmental billing, improved reporting, and flexible ways to split costs across teams or regions. In this video, I’m joined by Microsoft Principal PM Akanksha Rakesh to break down:
☑️What’s new in Microsoft 365 Pay-as-you-go
☑️How departmental billing works
☑️Real-world scenarios for setup and chargeback
☑️Spending limits, budgets, and reporting tools
☑️What’s available today—and what’s coming next
Connect with Akanksha Rakesh on LinkedIn
Whether you’re already using Pay-as-you-Go or just getting started, this will help you get the most out of Microsoft 365’s usage-based model—especially for advanced Content AI features.
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Video Summary
- Pay-As-You-Go gives you flexibility to use premium Microsoft 365 services like Copilot chat, document processing, and e-signatures without committing to full licenses—just pay for what you use.
- Departmental billing is now supported, allowing you to assign different Azure subscriptions to different teams (like HR, Sales, or Legal) so each department can manage its usage and costs.
- Budgets and spending limits are on the way, allowing admins to set monthly caps, receive alerts, and even stop services when limits are hit—except for critical services like backup.
- Cost reporting is currently done in Azure, with detailed insights like which site or feature generated the cost. Microsoft is working on bringing some of that visibility into the Microsoft Admin Center.
- It’s super easy to set up, and many features come with free usage for a limited time, so you can try things like document translation and autofill columns at no cost until the end of June.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Transcript
Hello everyone! We are live from the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, where Microsoft just made some amazing announcements for the SharePoint Pay-As-You-Go services or all the content AI services that you can use on top of SharePoint. And those features will make it easier for you to implement them in your organization. But to go over them, I’m lucky enough to have Akanksha, a product manager at Microsoft, here with me.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you, Vlad. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to represent my work.
Oh, it’s my pleasure. And it’s the first time you’re on the channel. Can you please introduce yourself to everybody who doesn’t know you?
Yeah, absolutely. I am Akanksha, and I am representing the product group for M365 Pay-As-You-Go billing.
Awesome. And first of all, Pay-As-You-Go—I think a lot of people don’t know, like, wait, Pay-As-You-Go, is that Compiler Studio stuff? Microsoft did so many Pay-As-You-Go things. What is Pay-As-You-Go?
Yeah, so M365 Pay-As-You-Go essentially gives organizations the flexibility to use premium services like backup, archive, SharePoint Embedded, document processing features like you mentioned—autofill, translations, e-signatures—and features like Copilot Chat, SharePoint agents, without committing to a license. So you pay for what you use.
That is awesome because so many companies are afraid, in a way, to commit to that $30 per user per month for the whole year, or they don’t want to pay a backup fixed price and not know if they use it. So this allows them to pay only for what they need. And it has been there for over a year now, I think?
Two years.
Two years! Wow, time goes by fast.
It does. It sure does.
So it’s been there for two years, but at this conference, you announced something that many people wanted. I won’t say anything—I’ll let you tell us what it was.
Yeah, what we announced was a capability to support multiple subscriptions, which internally we also call departmental billing. Essentially, what it is, is if your organization has cost centers or just wants to use different subscriptions for different teams so that they can charge them separately, or they can monitor their budgets separately, this allows a company—say, Contoso—to be able to give their marketing team and their HR team access to Copilot Chat, right, while other users could be licensed as well. So yeah, it was one of the biggest asks from our customers, and we released it for Copilot Chat just last month.
That’s amazing because so many times, IT has no budget in companies, unfortunately for us. So there’s like, I know that billing—I have to bill marketing, bill things like that. But before, we only had one bucket, right? We had one bucket, and then it was one subscription that applied to the whole tenant. So, no matter what service you were using, it was all being charged to that one subscription.
Which works for a lot of companies.
Yeah.
But larger organizations wanted more granularity in how they charged.
Awesome. So, how does it work?
So let me show it to you. In Microsoft Admin Center, admins will go to enable Pay-As-You-Go for Copilot Chat. Here, they will see under Billing and Usage a capability to add a billing policy. What a billing policy is, is essentially a mechanism to charge the subscription. So let’s say they can create a billing policy for the Sales team, and they can select the right subscription for the Sales team.
So those are Azure subscriptions, correct?
Exactly.
So that is awesome because before we only had one subscription.
That’s right.
For the whole tenant. So right now already I can already have multiple subscriptions.
Exactly. Yeah. And you can select the region. The region essentially refers to the meter you want to charge. And that’s it. Now, this is another extension to the departmental billing, which made sense because since you are creating it for the Sales group, you are using the Sales subscription, you would want only unlicensed users in the Sales security group or organization to use the feature. So here you will see all the security groups, and you can choose to either give access just to the Sales group or to all users.
So basically, you can create just one policy for the whole tenant.
Awesome, right?
Yeah. So we’re not losing what we had before. If one policy is good for you, less stuff to manage.
Exactly.
Exactly. Yeah. And that’s it. This is how a billing policy is created, and this will now be available in the list of billing policies. So I have created many billing policies like HR, Legal, Sales, and all you need to do is when you go to Pay-As-You-Go services, you’ll see Copilot Chat right here.
This is the first one?
This is the first one.
Awesome.
And all the billing policies will be listed right here, and you can decide whether you want to give it to all company or you want to only select certain people.
Certain people.
Exactly.
So this way, if—let’s say I see you have HR, Legal, and Sales—so if I’m in Marketing, I wouldn’t be able to use Copilot Chat with agents because I’m not part of a billing policy.
Yeah, you’re not part of that security group, so you will not be able to use it.
Awesome.
Okay, so this is for Copilot Chat. And in the future, what is the next one that’s going to be here?
So we have laid the foundation for departmental billing. It already exists, right? Now our priority is to get all of the features on this. So be it, SharePoint agents, backup—these all will be coming on, all document processing features. We are actively working on getting all of them to the departmental level.
How will it work for, like, say, backup, as an example, since you mentioned it? Will I tag a site to a billing policy, or does it depend on the owner? How do I connect those?
That’s right. For backup, it will mostly be tenant-level policies, and the scoping will work at the site level.
Oh yeah, because when we create the backup, we create a backup policy. So I’ll do the backup policy, and I’ll tag it to the billing policy, right?
Awesome. So in the backup admin center, all these policies will be available, and they can associate specific sites with them.
That is cool. So backup, archive—what about things like autofill columns, translations, things like that?
Are those going to be similar concepts in terms of scoping?
So there is also site scoping, and there’s something we are looking into, which makes more sense for these products. Because, as you said, security group scoping may make more sense for Copilot Chat but not for backup. So we are going through all the products and giving them whatever capabilities they need to enable departmental billing.
Awesome, because we have like 15 Pay-As-You-Go features just for content AI without counting backup, archive, chat, agents—all of that.
So 18 or 19 in total and still counting.
Yeah, wow.
That’s amazing. Well, and I have so many questions, but I’ll let you show the rest of the stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because we use Azure subscriptions and Azure meters behind the scenes, we integrate very closely with Azure to make sure that admins have all the necessary tools and capabilities to understand where the cost is coming from. We ensure that when we integrate with these products, we send information like which feature the cost is coming from, which tenant it’s associated with, and especially for features like autofill, e-signature, and translations that happen on SharePoint sites, we also send site information. This way, the admin can go into Azure and see exactly which site the cost is coming from. We found this information to be very valuable, and we make sure that admins have this drill-down capability available.
That’s something that’s needed. Just to confirm, all the reporting will not be done in the M365 side of things—you are sending the information to Azure, and all the reporting is done in Azure right now?
Right now, yes. But what we are trying to do is show some sort of reporting in the Microsoft Admin Center (MAC), at least to begin with, for Copilot scenarios. Then we’ll talk about budgets, which we are working on. When it comes to budgets, you have to show what the cost and usage look like, so there will be some sort of reporting there as well.
By the way, MAC—for those of you that don’t know the acronym—is the Microsoft Admin Center. I know there are a lot of acronyms in the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s like “set up page in the MAC” and everything, and you end up like—I’m guilty of using “page” all the time.
Yes, I’m trying not to, but yeah.
Now, you mentioned budgets. So right now, when you set up the billing policy, you just set what Azure subscription to go in. We were able to set budgets in a way in Azure, but it was not a pretty way to do it. Are you coming up with a cooler way to do it?
Yes. Budgets in Azure are a great capability for admins to say, “I don’t want to spend more than this amount.” Now that we are coming up with different billing policies for different departments, what we are giving admins is the capability to say, “I don’t want to spend more than this amount,” and I want the capability to maybe stop the service if it hits that amount. So we’re giving admins the choice and control over what they want to do when the budget is met. There will be capabilities for notifications, so they can choose to receive notifications at different points of the budget. But they can also say that for some features, having a hard shutdown may not make sense—some features are business-critical.
Exactly. You don’t want backup to stop.
Exactly. So I wanted to mention that. That’s one feature where we may, when we are rolling it out, say that shutdown is not available for backup.
And I see you have $60,000—is that per month, or what is the budget per?
That’s essentially enabling admins to set a budget at a monthly level that resets monthly, or they can just set it up and forget about it. Whenever it hits, they get notifications.
Okay, and I see you can set multiple alerts there. You have the choice—do you want to send one at 50%, 100%, all of that?
Exactly. Yes, exactly.
That’s really cool.
Yes. Also, with the onset of budgets, as they come, there will be some UX experience changes to show how they are doing with their budgets, whether the budgets are met, some status around that. These are the changes we’re making to make the admin’s life easier. Anything that gets that done, we appreciate.
That is amazing. And you can see it—you get the service stop, healthy, all of that. That is pretty cool. And you also see the services that it applies to.
Yes.
Amazing.
Yes. So this is another thing we were talking about—where will admins see the cost? Right now, it is in Azure. As I said, we want to empower our admins with whatever information they need to set budgets, especially if they are opting for a hard shutoff. This is where we are thinking about showing what their cost usage looks like—how many times they’ve gone over budget, how many times they’ve stayed under budget. All of this will help them set more educated budgets.
Hopefully, more under budget.
I hope so!
Do you plan to have—Azure has it where they show, “If you keep going like this, this is where you’re going to reach at the end of the month.” So let’s say on the 15th—
Forecasting?
Yes.
Not in the initial versions, but that’s definitely something we are looking into. Like, if you see the line going like a hockey stick, then you know it’s a bit bad. But no, that is amazing. Having that is really good. And again, hopefully less red—we don’t want to see that much red. It’s important to have it, but we don’t want to see red.
No, that is amazing. Now, when do we get it? I can’t wait to set this up. Well, you told me that Copilot Chat—we can already do it, right?
Copilot Chat—you can do departmental billing. Budgets are coming next for Copilot Chat. And again, departmental billing and budgets will all slowly roll out to all other products as well. So this year, we’re rolling out departmental billing for—or multiple subscriptions for—all of our products. Budgets for all of our products, including Copilot Chat, that is our priority.
And then, besides these feature sets, another thing we are also really focusing on is making it Government Cloud compliant so that all of this—Pay-As-You-Go in general—is not available in Government Clouds right now.
I’m Canadian, so I know a bit less about the GCC, but I know it’s very important. So right now, you don’t have any Pay-As-You-Go in any GCC?
That’s right.
But at least when they get it, all of this will already be here?
Yes, exactly. We want to make sure that when we are ready to support this, we are doing it in a compliant way. So yeah, we are going through all our processes right now.
Awesome. So for those of you in GCC, you’ve waited two years, but at least when you get it, you’ll have the latest stuff inside. I know sometimes they have to wait a bit more than everybody else. When they see stuff at a keynote, they’re like, “Okay, the months or years countdown has started.”
We just make sure that we are doing it right. And sometimes that takes time, but sometimes that’s the most important thing as well.
I agree. Especially when you get into those exotic tenants, as I like to call them. I’m Canadian—I don’t have access to them, so they’re exotic tenants for me.
Exotic tenants.
Yeah. Awesome. So we looked at departmental billing, we looked at budgets, at the limits. With all this in mind, is there a call to action or something that you would like people to try?
Yes, I would like people to try and set up Pay-As-You-Go. It’s very easy. And good news is that a lot of features that we talked about—like autofill, translations on your document—they come with included capacity for a limited time, which means folks can try these capabilities out for no cost. So there’s no reason for anybody not to give this a try.
That’s amazing. And I know autofill column—I love it. I used to have to do the model, models, and things like that. And it was good, but it took time. Autofill columns are amazing. So just having that and not having to manually tag and make my information managers happy—and I’m happy because I don’t have to manually do it. So Excel win-win.
And also, there are a few features that are not in here that you get for free just by enabling Pay-As-You-Go. So the annotations, for example, you get for free. Content query—you get for free. So there is no reason not to enable Pay-As-You-Go. You get like five or six features that just appear without spending a cent.
Yes.
How do people set up Pay-As-You-Go for these features?
It’s very easy. You will find Pay-As-You-Go under Org Settings in Microsoft Admin Center. Once you go to Org Settings, you will see Pay-As-You-Go right there. And to enable or use any of the features mentioned, go to the Syntex services, choose your subscription—this should be set up in Azure, your resource group, and the region you are using it from. And that’s it.
That’s it?
Really, that’s it. It’s so easy. All you need is an Azure subscription created in Azure and a resource group in Azure. And just turning this on will enable all of the services that we talked about. And in the service tab, you will be able to see the services available.
Awesome. And yeah, I see here you have it. The thing that I like is, you know, you can turn on Pay-As-You-Go, but you don’t have to turn all of them on yet. You can go for each service.
That’s right.
Turn on the services you want. And also, you don’t even have to turn it for every site. You can say, “You know what? For document translation, we’re only going to turn it on for those 10 sites because I don’t want people getting lazy and translating contracts.” So in the screenshot, you will see I have document translations shown, and there you can just—right now it’s all site—but you can edit the site and say, “I want only one or two sites,” and that’s what will be enabled.
So, the only thing for your M365 admins—you will need to create that subscription in Azure. So you’ll need to pay for a beer or a coffee to your Azure admin who has the rights.
And you also need a resource group, if I remember correctly, to be configured this way. And after you have that, it’s easy. And I think the person configuring it needs to be an owner of the subscription in Azure?
That’s right—owner or a contributor. We want to make sure that the right person is using the subscription, so yeah, these permissions are important.
Yeah, so there might be, again, a coffee or a beer for your Azure admin. Always will make it go faster. But once they’re done, it’s like select, done, and that’s it.
Yeah. And if you want to see how easy it is to use translations, I can quickly show that to you as well. I’m in a SharePoint site, and I use my document. In the three tabs, you will see a translate feature available. Here, you can select whatever language you want to translate the document to, and you can choose up to 10 as well.
Yeah, which is kind of cool.
And that’s it. Now you wait 10 seconds, and it’s there. It will be there as another row item. But that’s how easy it is to use Pay-As-You-Go. You enable it in Microsoft Admin Center, and here you are, able to translate a document.
How cool is that?
It’s amazing, right?
Yeah, especially for me—I’m from Canada, so English and French is mandatory. I’m from Quebec, so it’s mandatory. And I know in Europe, I mean, you have so many companies that are multinational, and having that there is amazing. Whether it’s document translation, you can do video translation with the transcripts and all of that. So I’m a big fan of it.
Thank you.
Awesome. For everybody watching, you saw how easy it is. You will have some additional links to Microsoft Learn on how to enable it, prerequisites, and all of that in the description below. And do it fast—there is that limited-time promotion until the end of June, I think you mentioned. So once you see this video, go try it out. You might have two months of free usage. So try it out, get that proof of concept going, and start using Pay-As-You-Go.
Thank you so much for your time.
No, thank you. It’s really, really appreciated. And thank you for everything you do.
Thank you very much for the community. And for everybody else, if you enjoyed this video, make sure you like it and subscribe to the channel for more awesome videos like this one.
