AI Builder Pricing 2026: Credits, Cost Per Invoice Page and Microsoft AI Builder Licensing

Last updated August 2026. Every rate on this page was read from Microsoft's own documentation on learn.microsoft.com in August 2026, principally the AI Builder capability rate table (article dated 2026-08-03), the AI Builder credit management article (2026-01-14) and the end of AI Builder credits article (2026-05-14). Prices are US dollars.

AI Builder pricing at a glance: one invoice page, three ways to buy it

AI Builder does not publish a price per invoice. It publishes a credit rate, and the credit has a different dollar value depending on which purchasing vehicle you hold. The prebuilt invoice model bills 32 AI Builder credits or 8 Copilot Credits per page. Here is what that costs.

The headline is in the last column. The cheapest way to read an invoice through AI Builder is the one you are no longer allowed to buy. If you are evaluating AI Builder today as a new customer, $80 per 1,000 pages at pay-as-you-go rates is your real number, and $64 if you commit to prepaid packs.

The complete AI Builder capability rate table

This is the table that decides the bill, reproduced from Microsoft's licensing documentation. The dollar figures use Microsoft's own stated basis: 1 Copilot Credit at $0.01 pay-as-you-go, and the yearly prepaid Tier 1 AI Builder add-on at $500 a month for 1,000,000 credits.

Prompts split input from output rather than charging a blended token rate. Per 1,000 tokens, a basic model costs 1 AI Builder credit in and 3 out, a standard model costs 20 in and 60 out, and a premium model costs 140 in and 560 out. Your system prompt counts as input and reasoning tokens count as output.

The repricing was not uniform, and document work took the worst of it

It is tempting to read the Copilot Credits transition as a flat price rise. It is not. Comparing the pay-as-you-go Copilot Credit cost against the Tier 1 add-on cost for the identical operation, the multiplier ranges from a 33 percent discount to a 20x increase.

Two things fall out of that table. The first is that Copilot Credits flatten everything into buckets, so nuanced rates collapse: invoice extraction and object detection both become 8 credits, which is why one rises 5x and the other 20x. The second is that if your workload is genuinely just reading text off a page, the switch saves you money. It is structured field extraction, the thing an AP team actually needs, that got expensive.

What changed on November 1, 2025, and what changes on November 1, 2026

Microsoft announced the progressive end of AI Builder credits in October 2025. The features are not going anywhere; the currency is. Here is the published calendar.

Two clarifications matter for budgeting. Contracts that started before November 1, 2025 are honored for their full term, add-ons and seeded entitlements alike. And there is no automatic migration: Microsoft states there is no transition of seeded credits to Copilot Credits and no conversion ratio between the currencies. After November 1, 2026 those credits are simply gone.

How many invoice pages your seeded credits actually buy

Licensing decks quote seeded credits in the thousands, which sounds like meaningful capacity. Divided by 32 credits per invoice page, it usually is not. All of these allowances end on November 1, 2026.

Seeded credits from user licenses pool at the tenant level and are capped at 1,000,000 across the tenant, except Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, which is capped at 20,000. Per app licenses purchased before November 2022 carry no credits at all. A department with five Power Automate Premium seats holds 25,000 credits, which is 781 invoice pages a month, or roughly 26 pages a day.

What AI Builder's invoice model actually returns

The prebuilt invoice model is capable, and this is not a knock on the extraction quality. It returns 31 header fields with a confidence score on each, plus four nested collections: payment details (IBAN, bank account number, SWIFT, BPay biller code and reference), tax details (amount and rate), installment schedules, and line items.

Line items come back with amount, date, description, quantity, product code, tax, tax rate, unit and unit price. That is a genuine line-item extraction, not header-only capture, and it is a real advantage over tools that stop at the invoice total. Every call also returns the raw OCR text and the full set of detected key-value pairs, so you can pull fields the model does not name without paying for a second pass.

The published limits are worth checking against your document mix before you commit:

That locale list deserves a second look if you are a US business. It includes English for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and India, and it includes Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Portugal) and French (France). It does not include Spanish for Mexico or the United States, Portuguese for Brazil, or French for Canada. A US importer whose supplier base sits in Monterrey or Sao Paulo is outside the published support matrix.

AI Builder invoice cost against the alternatives

Per 1,000 invoice pages, extraction only, at published US rates:

One honesty note on the Azure line. As of August 2026 the Azure AI Document Intelligence pricing page renders every rate as a dash rather than a number, and directs you to sign in to the pricing calculator to see pricing for your program. The $10 per 1,000 pages figure is the last one we were able to verify from a published source, and we flag it rather than presenting it as current. Confirm it in the calculator against your own agreement before you rely on it.

The Azure comparison is the interesting one for a different reason. The field list AI Builder's invoice model returns is field for field the Azure AI Document Intelligence prebuilt invoice schema, down to the Dutch KVK number and the Australian BPay biller code. You can reach a very similar extraction through the Power Platform or directly through Azure, and the Power Platform path currently prices it around eight times higher.

When AI Builder is still the right call

None of the above says do not use it. If your invoice volume is small enough to sit inside credits you already own, if the value is in the approval flow rather than the extraction, and if keeping every document inside your Microsoft tenant is a governance requirement rather than a preference, AI Builder is a sensible answer and the per page rate is close to irrelevant.

The calculation changes when volume goes up, because the credit meter is linear and the workflow value is not. At 500 pages a month, Copilot Credits at pay-as-you-go cost $40 and nobody notices. At 5,000 pages a month, the same meter costs $400 before premium licensing, before the flow run meter, and before the person who reviews the exceptions. That is the point at which a flat plan and a straightforward upload stop being a downgrade and start being the cheaper, simpler answer.