A five-person team, Business Central, and 210 heavy agent tasks a month. We put both invoices on screen and let them sit there: Microsoft’s AI layer lands at $2,030 a month, Hermes at $111. Every number in the film has a source, and the ones that are estimates are labelled as estimates.
What Copilot actually bills
- Seats — five Microsoft 365 Copilot licences at $30: $150.
- Copilot Studio — the agent builder, one 25,000-credit pack a month: $200.
- Cowork credits — 210 heavy tasks at roughly 800 credits each, $0.01 per credit: $1,680.
- Business Central — $400 for five users, and identical in both scenarios, so it stays out of the comparison.
That is $2,030 a month for the AI layer, or $24,360 a year. Push the volume up to 2,000 tasks a month and the credit line alone becomes $16,000 (seats and Studio take it to $16,350) — the licence is cheap, the meter is not.
The same work, the other way
- One Business Central licence for the agent — $80. Hermes needs a licence of its own to work inside BC. That is a real cost, and it is in the film rather than in a footnote.
- Tokens — DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, about 250k in and 25k out per task: $11, or $31 with a server to run it on.
$111 a month, $1,332 a year. Eighteen times cheaper, not a hundred — because the comparison keeps Business Central on both sides and pays for the agent’s licence. At the night-shift volume it is 2,000 tasks for $205 ($80 licence, $20 server, $105 in tokens) against $16,350.
Where the numbers come from
List prices as of October 2026: Copilot at $30 per user per month, Copilot Credits at $0.01 (light tasks 100–300 credits, medium 400–700, heavy 700 and up), Copilot Studio at $200 per 25,000-credit pack, Business Central Essentials at $80 per user. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is $0.15 in and $0.60 out per million tokens off-peak; the 236 tokens per second in the film is our own measurement from this server, not a vendor slide. The Copilot figure of about 30 tokens per second is an estimate from day-to-day use, not a published Microsoft number — treat it as such.
What the film does not claim
Copilot is native in Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, it is there on day one, and the compliance work is already done. That is worth money, and for a lot of companies it is the right answer. Hermes you run yourself, or you buy Hermes Business or Enterprise, and someone has to own the integration: an app registration in Entra, the Graph permissions, a provider key. The film shows that chain in four steps because pretending it does not exist would be the dishonest version.
Backed and connected
NVIDIA, Microsoft’s M12, Samsung and Y Combinator are investors in Nous Research, and NVIDIA is a launch partner for Hermes on RTX Spark. Hermes speaks Microsoft Graph, Business Central, mail and files, any MCP server and any third-party API; the model underneath is your choice — DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Claude, GPT, or something running on your own GPU when the data cannot leave the building.
Disclosure, since it belongs here: the film was scripted, built, voiced and rendered by a Hermes agent running DeepSeek V4.1. Which is either a nice proof of concept or a conflict of interest, depending on how generous you feel.
If you want the same comparison run on your own numbers — your licences, your task volume, your model choice — that is what the services page is for.