# SharePoint Premium (formerly Syntex) pay-as-you-go: what the meters are, what each service does and how to keep the Azure bill predictable > SharePoint Premium (formerly Syntex) bills its content AI services per transaction to your Azure subscription. What each meter counts, what each service does, how to scope libraries and set Azure budgets, and where SharePoint Advanced Management fits. Canonical: https://o365hq.com/blog/sharepoint-premium-pay-as-you-go-meters-services-and-predictable-azure-billing Provider: IT Partner LLC — US Microsoft partner since 2006. Book: https://o365hq.com/book Published: 2026-11-09 · IT Partner Microsoft renamed Syntex to SharePoint Premium in November 2023 and moved most of it to a pay-as-you-go model billed through an Azure subscription. That is a different shape of charge from the per-user licensing IT managers are used to, and the usual worry is a meter nobody is watching. This article lays out what each meter counts, what each service does, how to set it up in the Microsoft 365 admin center, how to limit which libraries can incur charges, and how to put an Azure budget in front of the whole thing. ## From Syntex to SharePoint Premium Microsoft Syntex was the per-user add-on license that gave SharePoint libraries machine-taught document understanding. In November 2023 Microsoft folded it into a broader brand, SharePoint Premium, and moved the content-processing services to a consumption model: you turn on the services you want, they meter the work they do, and the charge lands on an Azure subscription you own. Tenants that still hold the older Syntex license keep its entitlements; new customers use pay-as-you-go. The name covers two different things. The content AI services (document processing, content assembly, autofill columns, image and taxonomy tagging, eSignature, OCR and translation) are pay-as-you-go meters. SharePoint Advanced Management, which Microsoft also places under the SharePoint Premium umbrella, is a conventional per-user monthly license with no meter at all. ## How pay-as-you-go billing works An administrator links the Microsoft 365 tenant to an Azure subscription and a resource group, and every metered service posts its usage there. Microsoft invoices the Azure subscription monthly in arrears, and the line items appear in Azure Cost Management under the SharePoint Premium (formerly Microsoft Syntex) meter category, one meter per service. You need an Azure subscription even if you run nothing else in Azure; an empty one with a single resource group is enough. The charge is Microsoft's consumption charge on your subscription, and if you buy Azure through a partner's Azure plan it is passed through as your usage and your bill. And nothing is charged until a service is both enabled by an administrator and used against a library, so turning a feature on does not by itself start a meter. Microsoft publishes the per-transaction list prices on Microsoft Learn and changes them from time to time; what you can plan with is what a transaction is for each service. ## The services and what each meter counts **Document processing** is the core of the old Syntex, with three model types. Prebuilt models handle document shapes Microsoft has already trained, such as invoices, receipts and contracts, and extract fields such as vendor, total and dates into library columns. Structured and freeform models are built in AI Builder for forms and letters with a predictable layout; you label a handful of samples and the model extracts the fields. Unstructured models, taught in the SharePoint content center, classify documents by what they say and pull entities from running text. All three are metered per page processed: a twelve-page contract is twelve transactions, and every file uploaded to a library with a model attached is run through it, whether or not it is the kind of document the model was built for. **Content assembly** generates documents from a modern template mapped to columns or a list; each document created is one transaction regardless of length. **Autofill columns** let a library owner describe a column in plain language ("the renewal date in this agreement") and have SharePoint fill it from the file. It is metered per file processed, on new and edited files and, optionally, existing ones. **Image tagging** adds descriptive keywords to pictures, one transaction per image. **Taxonomy tagging** applies terms from your term store to a managed metadata column, one transaction per file. Both are enabled per library. **eSignature** sends a PDF or Word file for electronic signature from inside SharePoint. The meter counts each request created, not each signer, and a request that expires unsigned still counts. ## SharePoint Advanced Management is a license, not a meter SharePoint Advanced Management is a per-user monthly add-on license with no usage meter. Microsoft has also stated that users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses receive its capabilities, so check your tenant before buying it separately. It matters most for Copilot. Copilot answers from whatever a user already has permission to read, and in most tenants that is more than anyone intended: sites shared with everyone, organization-wide sharing links, inactive sites nobody owns. Advanced Management provides the site access reviews, data access governance reports, restricted access control and restricted content discovery that let you find and fence those sites before Copilot reads them. Our article on Copilot oversharing covers the remediation sequence; Advanced Management is the tooling it assumes. ## Setup in the Microsoft 365 admin center 1. Create or pick an Azure subscription and, inside it, a resource group dedicated to SharePoint Premium. 2. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, open Setup, find the Files and content section and choose "Use content AI with SharePoint Premium". Select pay-as-you-go, pick the subscription, resource group and region, and confirm. 3. On the Manage page that follows, turn on only the services you plan to pilot. 4. For document processing, create a content center site, where unstructured models are built and published to libraries. None of these steps generates a charge; charges start when a service processes something. ## Scoping libraries to limit charges Each metered service on the Manage page has a scope setting: available in all sites, in selected sites only, or in no sites. Setting every service to "selected sites" and listing the handful of libraries that need it is the most effective single control, because a library owner on an unlisted site cannot turn a meter on by accident. Inside the libraries you do allow, keep a processed library single-purpose: an Accounts Payable library that receives only invoices runs the invoice model over invoices, while a general Finance library runs it over every expense report and PDF export that lands there too. Turn on autofill and taxonomy tagging for new files first and run the existing-files pass deliberately, after you know the count. Give eSignature to the two or three roles that send contracts rather than to the whole organization. The admin center also exposes a usage report per service, so you can read the month's transaction counts before the Azure invoice arrives. ## Azure budgets and alerts Because the charge is Azure consumption, Azure Cost Management can watch it. Create a budget scoped to the resource group you dedicated to SharePoint Premium, set the monthly amount you are comfortable with, and add alert conditions at half the budget and at the full budget. Budgets alert, they do not cap; nothing in Azure or SharePoint stops the meter when the amount is reached, so pair the alert with the scope settings above. ## A worked scenario in document counts A 150-person professional services firm wants invoice extraction for Accounts Payable, contract generation for client engagements and electronic signature on those contracts. Accounts Payable receives about 180 vendor invoices a month, averaging two pages each, into a dedicated library with the prebuilt invoice model attached: roughly 360 document-processing transactions a month. The engagement team generates about 25 engagement letters a month from a content assembly template: 25 transactions. Each letter goes out for signature once, with two signers: 25 eSignature transactions, because the meter counts requests, not signers. If the firm also turns on taxonomy tagging for a 9,000-file client records library and chooses to tag the existing files, that is a one-time 9,000 transactions in the first month and then perhaps 300 a month for whatever is added or edited. Put those counts against the current per-transaction prices on Microsoft's pricing page and you have a monthly figure before anything is turned on. The first-month spike from the existing-files pass is the item people forget, and the reason the budget alert should be set before the tagging job runs. The metered usage and the Advanced Management licenses are Microsoft's charges at Microsoft's prices; IT Partner's implementation (setup, budget, content center, models, templates and scoping rules) is a fixed fee. ## Frequently asked questions ### Do I need an Azure subscription if I run nothing in Azure? Yes. Pay-as-you-go posts its usage to an Azure subscription and resource group. An otherwise empty subscription is enough. ### Does turning a service on in the admin center start a charge? No. Charges begin when the service processes something: a page through a model, a document from a template, a file through a tagger, a signature request sent. ### Is SharePoint Advanced Management pay-as-you-go? No. It is a per-user monthly license. Microsoft has stated that Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses include its capabilities; confirm in your tenant before buying it separately. ### Can an Azure budget stop the meter? No. Budgets send alerts at the thresholds you set. The scope settings in the admin center are what prevent unplanned libraries from running a meter. ## Sources - Microsoft Learn, "Pay-as-you-go services and pricing for Microsoft SharePoint Premium", consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Set up Microsoft SharePoint Premium pay-as-you-go billing" and "Manage Microsoft SharePoint Premium services", consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Overview of document processing in Microsoft SharePoint Premium", consulted November 2026. - Microsoft Learn, "Microsoft SharePoint Advanced Management overview", consulted November 2026. ## Key takeaways - Syntex became SharePoint Premium in November 2023; the content AI services are metered per transaction and billed to an Azure subscription you own. - Each meter counts something specific: pages for document processing and OCR, documents for content assembly, files for autofill and taxonomy tagging, images for image tagging, requests for eSignature. - SharePoint Advanced Management is a per-user license, not a meter, and is the tooling that finds and fences oversharing before Copilot reads it. - Scope each service to selected sites, keep processed libraries single-purpose, and put an Azure budget with alerts on the dedicated resource group before the first existing-files pass runs. --- Send us the libraries you want processed and a rough monthly document count, and we will scope the services, set up the Azure budget and quote the implementation as a fixed fee.