Most owners assume the AI inside their office software is a fixed monthly price. It is not. Microsoft's small-business Copilot licence is currently sold at a promotional rate that expires on a published date, while Google charges nothing extra for its equivalent. Same job, two completely different bills.
How much does Microsoft 365 Copilot actually cost in 2026?
Microsoft 365 Copilot for small business is an add-on, not a standalone product. On Microsoft's own pricing page the list rate is US$21 per user per month on an annual commitment, currently discounted to US$18, or US$25.20 if you pay month to month with no commitment.
The numbers, as published by Microsoft
--- Microsoft 365 Copilot add-on: US$21 per user per month, annual commitment. Promotional price US$18. Month-to-month price US$25.20.
--- Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot included: US$23.50 per user per month annual, US$28.20 month to month.
--- Microsoft 365 Business Premium with Copilot included: US$32.00 per user per month annual, US$38.40 month to month.
--- Seat ceiling: this small-business licence tops out at 300 users.
--- Prerequisite: the standalone add-on requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business plan underneath it. Copilot is not sold to a company with no Microsoft 365 subscription.
--- Currency: Microsoft publishes these figures in US dollars. No Hong Kong dollar price appears on the same page, so a local buyer should confirm the billing currency, and any partner pricing, before signing.
For a ten-person company on the promotional annual rate, that is US$180 a month, or US$2,160 a year, on top of whatever Microsoft 365 already costs.
Why is the price US$18 and not US$21?
Because US$18 is a promotion with an end date printed on Microsoft's pricing page. The footnote states the promotional rate is available from 1 July 2026 to 31 December 2026 and applies only to the annual commitment. It is a discount window, not the standing price.
What that means in practice
--- The offer: US$18 per user per month instead of the US$21 list price, a saving of US$3 per seat per month.
--- Eligibility: annual commitment only. The month-to-month rate of US$25.20 is not discounted.
--- Expiry: 31 December 2026.
--- Renewal: the list price is US$21, so budget for the higher figure when the term rolls over.
--- Exclusion: the promotion is on the add-on. The bundled Business Standard and Business Premium prices above are the ones Microsoft shows without a promotional footnote.
There is a real decision hiding in this. Signing an annual commitment inside the window locks the lower rate for the term. Waiting until January means starting at list. For ten seats the difference is US$360 over a year, which is small enough that it should not, on its own, push you into a purchase you were not going to make anyway.
What do you have to be paying for before Copilot works?
A qualifying Microsoft 365 Business subscription, and, more importantly, a business whose documents actually live inside it. Copilot does not read your computer. It reads what Microsoft 365 can already see, and only what the individual user is already permitted to see.
Microsoft's own support documentation, updated on 18 August 2026, is explicit about this. Grounding reaches content the user is authorised to access in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365. If no relevant accessible source exists, Copilot falls back to a generic answer. If it is pointed at outdated files, it will produce outdated answers.
That single paragraph decides whether the purchase works. A company whose quotations sit in SharePoint, whose email is in Outlook and whose meetings run in Teams has fed Copilot a real archive. A company whose files sit on a local network drive, in personal Google accounts, or in WhatsApp threads has bought a very expensive writing assistant.
Is the AI in Google Workspace really free?
Not free, but not a separate line item either. Google folded Gemini into Workspace in early 2025 and stopped selling it as an add-on. The AI is now included in Business Standard, Business Plus and the Enterprise tiers, so if you already pay for one of those, the incremental cost of the AI is nothing.
This is where Google clearly wins the comparison, and it should be said plainly. A Workspace Business Standard customer has already bought the AI. A Microsoft 365 Business Standard customer has not, and is looking at an add-on.
Two caveats keep it honest.
--- Business Starter is the exception. Google's plan comparison shows the cheapest Workspace tier gets only limited Gemini help in Gmail, not the AI features in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet and Chat. If your team is on Starter, you do not have what people mean when they say Workspace includes AI.
--- The upgrade price is not published. Google's higher-capacity AI add-on for Workspace, which raises the monthly and daily caps on image generation, Sheets AI functions, video and notebook tools, carries no price on its official page. Google states that pricing depends on local currency and term, and shows it only inside the admin console. A buyer who needs to forecast that cost has to go and get a quote.
Google also documents that its consumer Gemini usage limits are compute-based, refreshing on a rolling basis up to a weekly ceiling, rather than a simple daily count. Any "X requests per day" figure you read on a comparison site is an approximation, not a contractual limit.
What will Copilot not do, even at US$18?
Three limits matter enough to name before you sign anything, and none of them appear in the marketing.
It cannot see what it is not licensed to see. External systems such as your accounting package or CRM are outside Microsoft 365 unless somebody builds a connector. Out of the box, Copilot answers from the suite, not from your whole business.
The free tier is a different product. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat is included at no extra cost with eligible plans and covers chat and Copilot in Outlook. The deeper grounding in your organisation's own content sits behind the paid licence. Trying the free tier and concluding "Copilot is not impressive" is a common and expensive misjudgement, in both directions.
Custom agents are metered, and the meter resets. Where a business builds its own agents, usage is billed in Copilot Credits. Microsoft's documentation, updated in August 2026, prices a classic answer at 1 credit, a generative answer at 2, an agent action at 5, and tenant-wide grounding in your organisation's data at 10. Prepaid capacity is sold in packs of 25,000 credits per month, and unused credits do not roll over. Usage by someone who already holds a full Copilot licence is not charged against the pack.
On the independent evidence, Gartner's published survey work on Microsoft 365 Copilot reports a consistent pattern: employees report value, while tangible business impact remains harder to demonstrate, and funding is shifting from IT budgets to business owners who must justify it. Both vendors also promote Forrester Total Economic Impact studies with striking return figures; those studies are commissioned by the vendors themselves and should be read as marketing, not as neutral research.
So who should pay, and who should wait?
The honest verdict depends almost entirely on which suite you already run and where your documents live, not on which AI is cleverer. Here is the recommendation by buyer type.
You are on Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Premium, and your files really are in SharePoint, Outlook and Teams. This is the cheapest window of 2026 to test it. Buy a small number of seats on the annual rate before 31 December, give them to the people who write the most, and measure. Do not licence the whole company on day one.
You are on Google Workspace Business Standard or above. You have already bought AI. Paying Microsoft as well means paying twice for overlapping capability. Use what you have, and revisit only if a specific task genuinely fails.
You are on Microsoft 365 Business Basic, or Workspace Business Starter. Neither product will impress you, because both are grounded in a suite you are barely using. Move your documents in first. The AI is the last step, not the first.
Your files live on a local drive, in personal accounts, or in chat threads. No seat licence fixes this. Anything you buy this quarter will answer generically, and you will conclude, wrongly, that the technology does not work.
What you actually want is a job done, not a faster typist. Both products assist a person who is already doing the work. Neither one owns a process end to end. If the problem you are trying to solve is that nobody has time to do the task at all, a per-seat assistant is the wrong shape of answer.
Frequently asked questions
Short answers to the questions Hong Kong buyers ask most often, based on the vendors' own published pages as at 31 August 2026.
Can I buy Copilot without Microsoft 365?
Not this licence. The small-business add-on requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business plan underneath it.
What happens to my price on 1 January 2027?
The promotional rate ends on 31 December 2026. The published list price is US$21 per user per month on an annual commitment, so plan around that number.
Is there a Hong Kong dollar price?
Not on the public pricing pages examined for this article. Both vendors publish US dollar figures there. Confirm your billing currency at checkout or with a local partner before you commit.
Is monthly billing worth the flexibility?
It costs US$25.20 per user per month against US$18 on the promotional annual rate, a difference of US$7.20 per seat every month. For a genuine two-month trial that premium can be worth paying. For a year, it is not.
Do unused Copilot Credits carry over?
No. Microsoft's documentation states that prepaid capacity is 25,000 credits per month and unused credits do not roll over.
How many seats should a ten-person company start with?
Start with the two or three people who spend the most time writing, summarising or searching for documents, run it for a full month, and count the hours actually saved. Then decide.
The takeaway
US$18 is a real discount with a real deadline, and for a Microsoft-based company with its documents in the right place, it is a reasonable month to run a small, measured trial.
For everyone else, the deadline is a distraction. If you are on Google Workspace above the Starter tier, you already own comparable AI. If your files are scattered, no seat licence repairs that. And if what you needed was a whole job covered rather than a faster draft, neither product was ever the answer.
Deciding which of those four sentences describes your company is a twenty-minute conversation, and it will save you more than US$3 a seat. We understand AI. UD stands with you.
Reviewed by the UD AI team, Hong Kong, 31 August 2026. Prices quoted are the vendors' published list and promotional rates as at that date and are subject to change.
If the answer is "a job done", not "a faster typist"
A per-seat assistant makes your staff quicker. It does not take a role off your payroll. UD's AI Staff Solution is built for the other problem, the one where the work simply is not getting done. Tell us which task is stuck, and we will walk you through it step by step, from a plain-language assessment to a role that runs on its own.
