Hi everyone,

I'm seeing some unexpected Copilot Credit consumption with an Agent Flow in Copilot Studio, and I'd like to understand whether this is expected behavior or if something is misconfigured.

My environment

I have only one Agent Flow in my environment and there is no other environment.
There are no Copilot Studio agents, no other flows, no Power Automate cloud flows, and nothing else that should be consuming Copilot Credits.
The Agent Flow is triggered by "When a new email arrives (V3)".
The flow is used to create a ServiceNow incident whenever someone sends an email to a specific mailbox.

I've attached screenshots of:

The complete Agent Flow.
The Copilot Credits consumption graph.

What I'm observing

Date	Agent Flow Runs	Copilot Credits Used
9 Jul	1 run	5.11
10 Jul	1 run	5.76
11 Jul	0 runs	3.38
12 Jul	0 runs	3.12
13 Jul	0 runs	2.99
14 Jul	Flow turned OFF at 10:00 AM IST	1.30
15 Jul	Flow remained OFF all day	0.00

The daily metering starts at 12:00 AM IST.

What confuses me

I understand that running the Agent Flow will consume Copilot Credits (although ~5-6 credits for a single run already seems high).

However, what I don't understand is why I'm seeing 3-4 Copilot Credits consumed on days when the flow never ran at all.

To verify this, I intentionally did not trigger the flow on 11th, 12th, and 13th July, yet credits were still consumed every day.

Then I performed another test:

On 14 July, I turned OFF the Agent Flow around 10:00 AM IST.
Credit consumption dropped to 1.30 that day.
On 15 July, with the flow still disabled, there was no Copilot Credit consumption at all.

Based on my testing, it appears that Copilot Credits are being consumed even on days when the Agent Flow does not execute. However, I don't know whether this is expected behavior, an issue with the email trigger, or a metering problem.

My questions

Why are Copilot Credits being consumed on days when the Agent Flow never runs?
Does simply keeping an Agent Flow enabled consume Copilot Credits, even if no trigger event occurs?
Could the "When a new email arrives (V3)" trigger be responsible for this behavior, or should credits only be consumed when the flow actually executes?
Is this expected metering behavior, or does it indicate an issue with Copilot Studio billing?
Has anyone else observed similar behavior with Agent Flows?

From my testing, the evidence seems to be:

Flow enabled → daily Copilot Credits consumed even without executions.
Flow disabled → no daily Copilot Credit consumption.

I'd appreciate it if someone could clarify whether this is expected behavior or if this indicates an issue with billing/metering.

Thanks!

Categories:

Copilot Studio skills development

Copilot Studio pre-built agents/templates

Autonomous agents

Bot analytics

Bot administration

Publish & channel management

Topic creation & management

Model context protocol

Building Copilot Studio chatbots in Microsoft Teams

Calling actions from Copilot Studio

General topics

Bot extensibility

Hi @MA-13070621-0

The polling explanation is plausible, because Microsoft documents that polling triggers wake up periodically to check for new events. However, I haven’t found official documentation stating that each trigger check is billed as a Copilot Credit or Agent flow action.

Microsoft’s billing documentation says Agent Flows consume credits for executed actions, while polling documentation only describes how triggers check for events. Those are not necessarily the same billing unit.

A useful test would be to leave the email trigger enabled with no downstream actions and compare its Agent flow action consumption against a manual trigger and a scheduled trigger. If the email-only version still consumes credits with zero runs, this may be undocumented trigger metering or a reporting issue worth escalating to Microsoft Support.

Hope this helps!

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