A cheaper Microsoft Copilot alternative for UK SMBs

Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is genuinely good software. The integration with Word, Outlook and Excel is what most SMBs actually want from AI. The price, however, is a problem: £24.70/user/month on top of your existing M365 licensing, paid forever, for every user.

For a 25-person firm that's roughly £7,400 a year, forever, before VAT. For most UK SMBs, that's painful. This post is the honest comparison — when Copilot is the right call, and when an alternative pays off.

Where Copilot is genuinely worth it

You're deep in the Microsoft 365 graph. Documents in SharePoint, mailboxes in Exchange, meetings in Teams. The whole-firm "summarise this Teams meeting and put the actions into Planner" workflow is something only Copilot does, because only Copilot has access to that graph.

You have power users in Excel. Copilot in Excel turns "describe what I want analysed" into a working pivot table. Power users who use Excel daily save serious time.

You're already paying for M365 Business Premium. The marginal £24.70 isn't a separate procurement battle — it's a checkbox in an existing renewal.

Where it stops being worth it

Casual users who use Word twice a week don't need to be paying £24.70/month. The per-seat-for-all model means you're paying the same for the partner who lives in Word as for the office manager who uses it for the occasional letter.

You have a regulator (SRA, ICAEW, FCA, CQC) that's asking specific questions about where client data goes. Copilot routes data through Microsoft's tenancy — that's fine for many firms, but it's still an external party with your client data, and the audit story is opaque.

You're a one-tool-per-firm shop. Many SMBs want a single AI for the team to use across email drafting, research, brainstorming, and triage — not an AI tied to one Office app at a time.

The alternative shape

AI In Your Pocket is a one-off £1,997 (Self-Install) or £3,497 (Managed Install) plus optional £497/year support. For that, you get a private AI assistant deployed on a Windows machine in your office, reachable by the whole team via Telegram, with persistent per-user memory.

For a 25-person firm in year one, that's £2,494 (Self-Install + first-year support) vs £7,400 (Copilot at £24.70 × 25). In year two, £497 vs £7,400. Over five years, roughly £4,485 vs £37,000.

The catch (be honest about it)

AI In Your Pocket does not integrate with Word, Outlook, or SharePoint in v1. The interface is Telegram. Your team types a message; the AI replies; they copy the reply into Word or Outlook.

For some firms — particularly Microsoft-deep ones — that workflow is a non-starter. For others, it's actually a feature: the AI lives in a chat app the team already knows, works on phones and desktops without extra software, and doesn't require anyone to learn a new ribbon menu.

The decision is workflow-shape, not feature-count. If your team would happily pull up Telegram on their phone to ask the AI a question and then paste the answer into the document they're writing, AI In Your Pocket pays for itself in roughly 3 months. If they'd only use it if it appeared as a sidebar inside Word, pay for Copilot.

How to choose

For most UK SMBs of 5-50 people, we'd suggest: try the cheaper option first. The £1,997 sunk cost is recoverable from ~4 months of Copilot savings if it works. The £7,400/year Copilot commitment is much harder to undo once it's in the M365 renewal cycle.

For the sector-specific take on this comparison, see /for/[your-sector] from the homepage — each of 21 UK SMB sectors has a dedicated page.