Have you tried the new App Builder in Copilot Studio yet? It’s a fun way to spin up a working app from a prompt in minutes. But there’s a cost control setting tied to it that went straight over my head when Microsoft quietly published it in Message Center as “No action required.” Spoiler: it is worth a few minutes of your time. Here’s how to keep App Builder costs under control.
The Message Center notice that’s easy to skim past
On August 21, 2026, Microsoft posted Message Center item MC1458282, announcing a new Power Platform admin center rule called Cost controls – Draw from tenant credit pool. It reached general availability on August 26, 2026. The headline under “What action do I need to take?” reads: no action required. Easy to archive and move on, right?
Except this setting directly affects how much the App from App Builder in Copilot Studio can spend once an environment is created. This happens automatically when someone clicks “App” (Preview as of now) in Copilot Studio.
It’s not easy to catch either, since it appears to the user that he still is in his personal productivity environment after initializing the App builder. But he’s not. A developer environment has been created in the background, ready to burn tokens from your tenant’s overall budget!
Setting a rule
The way we can control this is to create a rule for the “Default Environment Group” in Power Platform admin center. The rule controls whether an environment is allowed to draw from the tenant’s credit capacity once it hits its own credit allocation, or if it has no allocation set at all. By default, “Draw from the available capacity in my tenant” is enabled at the environment level. This goes for all apps/environments that are created from “App (Preview)” in Copilot Studio.
Turn it off, and that environment is capped at whatever credits you set manually for the environment in the same menu. By default, this is zero for these new environments.
That matters for App Builder specifically because it’s new, easy to experiment with, and can burn through Copilot credits faster than you’d expect while you’re testing out a new idea.
The catch with environment groups
If you apply this rule to an environment group, it applies to every environment in that group, and it can no longer be changed per individual environment. If you need per-environment control, either keep that environment out of the group, or manage the setting directly on the environment instead.
How to configure it
- Open the Power Platform admin center.
- Go to Manage > Environment Groups.
- Select the environment group that contains your App Builder environment (or the environment itself, if you want to manage it individually).
- Add the Cost controls – Draw from tenant credit pool rule.
- Enable or disable it based on your governance needs.
- Apply the changes.
You can also manage this at scale across environments using the Power Platform API, if you’re responsible for more than a handful of environments.
What to do next after enabling the rule, to prevent all new apps from drawing on the tenant’s total credits, you ask? Have no fear, Underdog is here.
You can either set a manual credit budget per environment in the same menu as where you see the “Capacity coverages,” or create a new Environment Group and set a budget for all the environments you place there. The first option gives the best flexibility for individual adaptions per environment.
My summary
“No action required” in Message Center means Microsoft is not forcing a change, not that the setting is irrelevant. If you or your users are experimenting with App Builder, check whether the associated environments can draw from the shared tenant credit pool. If you want predictable spending, disable that access and assign a credit budget to each environment or Environment Group.
João Ferreira over at M365 Admin covered the original Message Center announcement in more detail, including the full rollout timeline — worth a read if you want the source material straight from Microsoft’s wording.
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