Can we set monthly Copilot Credit caps per agent?

You’re right to worry about the open meter. A tenant total is a rear-view mirror; the useful control is knowing which agent is about to spend the month’s goodwill.

Here’s what’s going on. In the Power Platform admin centre under Licensing → Copilot Studio → Manage Agents, admins can set a monthly Copilot Credit limit on each agent that incurs billing — whether the environment uses prepaid capacity or pay-as-you-go. From that page you can search agents, see month-to-date billed credits, configured limits, environment membership, and status (Within limit, Nearing limit, Over limit), and turn an agent off. After you set a limit you can configure notifications (environment and tenant admins) when usage approaches the threshold, and a hard stop that automatically turns the agent off at the limit. The same pattern appears in the GitHub Copilot harness cost guidance: select the agent → Set limit → enter the monthly figure → set the notification threshold → turn on Stop usage if you want the hard stop. Learn is also clear that agent limits don’t replace environment allocation: to contain prepaid spend, allocate capacity to the environment and clear Draw from the available capacity in my tenant; on pay-as-you-go, Azure budgets alert but do not stop usage — the agent hard stop is the workload brake.

This is Steady Cost before scale: Pane 07 Cost & Value owns the cap; makers get a request path, not a surprise blackout in production.

Options that actually work:

1. Cap noisy agents first. Put monthly limits + notifications on the top consumers; add hard stop only after you’ve warned the owner. Best Wave 0 habit.
2. Layer environment + agent. Allocate prepaid (or PAYG with an Azure budget), turn off tenant-pool draw for sandboxes, then apply org-standard development limits to new agents via a recurring process — Learn notes there is no tenant-wide default agent limit today.
3. Rely on the Azure budget alone. You’ll get email; the agent keeps spending. Fine for alerting, not for containment.
4. Freeze the whole environment. Theoretically neat; politically expensive. Use as escalation, not lifestyle.

12 Panes action / comms: Tell makers a week before hard stops go live: we’re not killing agents — we’re giving each one a fuel gauge. Leadership message: Steady Cost means named limits before maker freedom becomes an open Azure bill.

Benefits / risks: Per-agent caps stop one runaway bot from eating the pool; hard stop can interrupt a business process if you set the number from fear rather than expected demand. Production agents need a cost owner and an exception path to raise the limit.

I’d suggest this sprint: open Manage Agents, sort by month-to-date credits, set limits on the top five with notifications on, hard stop only where there’s a named owner and a documented raise request. You’ll have peace of mind when the invoice stops being a mystery.

DIGITAL SKILL WORKS LTD / 12 PANES · You ask, we answer