Apps in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio: Build a CRM Without Buying Dynamics

Update, 26 September 2026: Microsoft has named the platform these apps run on Copilot Managed Runtime and added Code, a tab in Copilot where anyone can build one. The full explainer is here: Copilot Code and Managed Runtime explained.

The CRM conversation at a smaller firm usually goes the same way. Everyone agrees the spreadsheet has to go. Someone gets a Dynamics 365 quote. The quote is for a system that does two hundred things, of which the firm needs nine, and the project stalls for another year.

On 10 September 2026 Microsoft moved that conversation. Ryan Cunningham, who runs Copilot Studio and the Power Platform, announced that you can now describe an app in Copilot Cowork or in Copilot Studio and get a working one back. This post covers what shipped, what it means for the firm with a Dynamics quote on the desk and what Microsoft’s own September credits guide says it will cost.

What Microsoft announced

Two entry points, one idea.

• Copilot Cowork. A built in App skill, invoked with /app or simply by describing the app you want. Cowork generates the data schema in a supported connector and builds the interface with the data sources already wired in. You refine it by conversation, open it to test it, publish it and share it by link with anyone in your organisation who can use Microsoft Copilot. This is available now to tenants in Microsoft’s Frontier programme.
• Copilot Studio. An App tile on the home screen, marked as preview, behind the new experience toggle. Copilot Studio uses agentic coding to turn the description into a working scaffold. Builders iterate in natural language, preview the result and can review the underlying code. Microsoft said this public preview would roll out over the week following the announcement.

The apps themselves are the interesting part. Microsoft describes them as full stack apps built on open standards, with Git backed source control, deployment stages and version isolation, so a team can work on the next version without breaking the live one. They run on a Microsoft managed host, sign users in through Microsoft Entra and respect the organisation’s data policies by default. IT gets an inventory of published apps in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. Users find them at managedapps.cloud.microsoft.com. The apps use connectors to reach business data and can call Work IQ for organisational context.

Microsoft’s examples are an onboarding app that shows progress and updates records, and a field service app that pulls technical context and writes results back. Neither is exotic. That is rather the point.

The CRM most firms actually need

Write down what a twelve person advisory firm wants from a CRM and the list is short. Companies and contacts. Who owns each relationship. Opportunities with a stage, a value, a close date and an owner. Activities and the next step. A view of what is stale. A pipeline summary for Monday morning. Ideally, all of it reachable from Outlook and Teams, because that is where the work happens.

Dynamics 365 Sales does every item on that list. It also does sequences, forecasting hierarchies, LinkedIn integration, marketing automation, customer service cases and a great deal of configuration a small firm will never open. Microsoft’s UK price list has Sales Professional at £50 per user per month, Sales Enterprise at £80.70 and Sales Premium at £115.30, all paid yearly. Twelve people on the cheapest tier is £600 a month, £7,200 a year, for a pipeline tracker.

That is the gap the new app builders land in. The description of the nine things above is a prompt. Add an admin page for stage names, a stale opportunities view and a weekly summary, and you are describing what Microsoft’s credits guide classes as a medium app: departmental, multiple connectors, moderate daily use.

None of this retires Dynamics. A firm running a real sales process, with team based forecasting, service cases and finance integration, is buying the machinery, not the contact table, and the machinery is worth paying for. A twelve person firm with one pipeline is not. The bespoke route has existed for years through Power Apps and SharePoint, as in our embedded Outlook CRM worked example. What has changed is that the first working version now takes a description rather than a build.

Two ways to pay for the app

Microsoft’s Copilot Credits Guide, updated in September 2026 to cover apps, sets out the licensing. There are two routes.

Route one: pure consumption. Building the app draws Copilot Credits while you author it, because generation and iteration run on a language model. Publishing it and running it on the managed host draw credits based on the volume and complexity of what the app does. Nobody needs a Power Apps licence. Pay as you go is metered at $0.01 a credit and billed in arrears, and the annual Pre-Purchase Plan discounts that by 5 to 20 per cent depending on volume. The Microsoft 365 admin centre carries the controls: spending policies, usage thresholds and allocation, including limits per user.

Route two: Power Apps Premium. For a user licensed with Power Apps Premium, £15.40 per user per month paid yearly, running apps built in Cowork or Copilot Studio is included. The inclusion sits inside that licence’s existing limit of 40,000 Power Platform requests per user per day, and usage above the limit is billed in credits. Microsoft’s request limits page is precise about who this covers. It is Power Apps Premium only. Per app plans, Power Apps pay as you go and Dynamics 365 licences that bundle Power Apps rights do not get it.

The nuance that applies to both. The licence covers the app. It never covers the AI inside it. An agent the app calls, a Work IQ API it queries or another AI runtime such as Fabric IQ draws credits at that service’s own rate regardless of how the app is paid for. Work IQ tool calls, for example, are metered at 0.1 credit each, and Work IQ chat and context queries vary with the reasoning involved. This is the same pattern as the GitHub Copilot harness in Copilot Studio: the container is cheap, the intelligence is metered.

What the numbers look like

The guide’s planning bands for apps are illustrative, and Microsoft labels them rough estimates. They are still the only published figures.

At $0.01 a credit, roughly three quarters of a penny at current exchange rates, a medium app costs about £3 to £6 to build and about £2 to £4 a month to run. Even the heavy band is under £40 a month per app. Set that beside £600 a month for twelve Dynamics Sales Professional seats, or £184.80 for twelve Power Apps Premium licences, and the shape of the decision is clear.

Three cautions before anyone circulates that comparison.

First, the build figure is per generation and you will iterate. Budget several builds, not one.

Second, the app is the cheap part. If the CRM gets an agent that drafts follow ups or a Work IQ lookup that pulls recent emails onto the contact record, that is where the credits go, and it is the same cost discipline as any Cowork task.

Third, this is preview pricing. The guide states that Microsoft can change pricing, business models and features before general availability without notice. What the app runtime costs at general availability is not settled, and a business case built on these bands should say so.

The checks the demos skip

1. Preview on both sides. The Cowork skill needs Frontier enrolment, which is a tenant level opt in with its own terms. The Copilot Studio tile is a paid public preview and needs usage-based billing switched on. Build the pilot now. Do not move the firm’s client list into it as the system of record this month.

2. Decide where the data lives before the prompt. The app generates its schema in a connector, so the choice of connector is the choice of database. For a CRM that is a Dataverse question, with the permissions, backups and retention that follow. Microsoft’s own Cowork guidance warns that anyone with a share link can use the app, including all its data. Sharing is a governance decision, not a convenience.

3. Someone owns the code. A generated app is code your firm now maintains, as with generated pages in Power Apps. The Git backed source control and deployment stages are there for a reason. Name the person who reviews a change before it reaches the live version.

4. Set the spend limits before you share the link. Consumption billing with no limit is how a pilot becomes an invoice. Configure spending policies and per user thresholds in the Microsoft 365 admin centre first, and use the cost dashboard to read real usage for a month before drawing conclusions.

5. Check the licences you already hold. A firm with Power Apps Premium already covers the app runtime. A firm with Dynamics licences does not, which surprises people. And whichever route applies, do not cancel Dynamics until the pilot has run for a full quarter and the reporting people rely on has been rebuilt.

Three containers, not one

Until this week a firm choosing where a business app should live had two Microsoft answers: a Power Apps model-driven app on Dataverse in a governed environment, or a Dynamics 365 product. There is now a third: an app described in Copilot Studio or Cowork, running on the managed host and billed by usage.

The sorting logic is familiar. Dynamics for firms that use the process machinery. Power Apps for a governed Dataverse app with an agent feed and the full environment tooling, which is still the right home for anything that touches regulated records. The new route for a small, well defined app that needs to exist quickly and can grow into either of the others. The question of whether the work belongs in an app, a flow or an agent does not change. The app is now the cheapest of the three to try, and the billing question that hangs over Copilot Studio hangs over this too.

What to do with this

Pick the one process the spreadsheet is worst at, usually the pipeline for one team. Write the description as if briefing a colleague: the records, the fields, the three views people actually open, the one summary that goes to the Monday meeting. Build it, share it with that team only, set a spend limit and read the credits after a month. Then put the number next to the Dynamics quote.

That description, and the licence sums beside it, is the kind of thing our Discover stage produces. If the app then needs an agent inside it, that is what our Copilot Studio agent builds cover. If you have a Dynamics quote you are not sure about, book a free consultation and we will start from the nine things your firm actually needs.

Sources checked

Last checked: 26 September 2026.

• Microsoft Copilot Blog, “Build apps in Copilot Cowork and Copilot Studio”, 10 September 2026
• Microsoft, Copilot Credits Guide, September 2026
• Microsoft Learn, “Use Copilot Cowork”, build apps with the App skill
• Microsoft Learn, “Requests limits and allocations”
• Dynamics 365 Sales UK pricing
• Power Apps UK pricing