Signing up for Azure directly on the website, as a free, pay-as-you-go or Visual Studio subscriber customer, gives you this type of billing account. There are no departments or invoice sections; it simply holds subscriptions.
Also called MOSP; pay-as-you-go.
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Terms in this definition
- Billing account
The highest scope under a Microsoft Customer Agreement or Partner Agreement. Billing profiles sit inside it and invoice sections inside those; the roles granted here cover invoices and creating subscriptions, never Azure resources.
Related terms
- Azure savings plan for compute
An agreement to spend a set hourly amount on qualifying compute, such as VMs, App Service, Functions Premium and Container Instances, in any region for one or three years in return for reduced prices. Anything used beyond that amount is billed at pay-as-you-go rates.
- Billing policy
Ties an Azure subscription and resource group to the whole tenant or to one group, so that pay-as-you-go Copilot usage (SharePoint agents or agents in Copilot Chat, for instance) gets charged. Admins create them in the Microsoft 365 admin center, can have 50 at most, and a budget on one only raises alerts.
- Commitment tiers
Log Analytics pricing levels starting at 100 GB per day that cut costs by around 15-30% versus pay-as-you-go, with no data dropped.
- Copilot Credit Pre-purchase Plan
A twelve-month Azure commitment for buying Copilot Credits at a reduced rate. Consumption is taken from it first, then falls back to pay-as-you-go when it's used up.
- Copilot Credits
The single unit in which Microsoft meters usage-based charges for agents and AI services, Copilot Studio among them. They're paid for with prepaid packs, a pre-purchase plan, or pay-as-you-go through Azure.
- Microsoft Copilot Chat
A secure AI chat that comes with qualifying Microsoft 365 licences and draws mainly on the web. Unlike the licensed Microsoft Copilot, it only works with organisational content that a user uploads, has open in Outlook or Teams, or reaches through a pay-as-you-go agent.
- On-demand classification
A scan that an administrator starts in Purview to classify files already stored in SharePoint, OneDrive and on endpoints using today's classifiers. An estimate comes first at no charge; the scan itself is billed by pay-as-you-go or per-user licensing.
- SharePoint agents
Agents grounded in SharePoint sites and libraries that summarise documents and answer questions, showing each person only what they are allowed to see. Licensing is through Microsoft Copilot or pay-as-you-go.