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Great question — this distinction is important for managing costs!
According to the Power Platform environments overview and Copilot Studio licensing, here's how environment types differ:
| Environment Type | Copilot Credits Billed? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Production | Yes | Standard billing applies |
| Sandbox | Yes | Non-production, but still billable |
| Trial | Yes (limited capacity) | Short-term, auto-cleaned up |
| Developer | No (non-billable) | Personal dev environments |
| Default | Yes | Shared tenant environment |
Developer environments are created under the Power Apps Developer Plan and are designed for individual development and testing without incurring production costs. Per Microsoft Learn, they have limited control (security groups can't be assigned) and are not intended for multi-user or production workloads.
Sandbox environments, by contrast, are full-featured non-production environments that mirror Production in terms of billing.
For cost-free testing of Copilot Studio agents, use a Developer environment rather than a Sandbox.
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Raghav Mishra — LinkedIn | PowerAI Labs
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