Limitation of Copilot agent development in M365 developer tenants

I am using a M365 developer subscription and have hit a wall trying to develop a functioning Copilot agent. I was able to sign up for Copilot Studio trial license. This enables creation of M365 Copilot agent with knowledge held in SharePoint lists. However, not having 'Semantic Index' is a severe limitation that defeats the purpose of developer subscription. The agent being unable to use 'Enhance SharePoint Search' setting aka 'Semantic Index' aka vector embeddings means the agent is basically dumb and not an intelligent AI agent.

After some research, I discovered the tenant needs at least one M365 Copilot license to enable 'semantic index'. To get my Copilot agent built, I decided to invest in this expensive license and then discovered a developer agent can neither have M365 Copilot or PAYG metered license.

What this all means is that 'M365 developer subscription CANNOT be used to build a Copilot agent grounded in data in SharePoint'. You may be able to create a dumb agent with web search.

A note that the agent I was building was not for a commercial customer. It was for my learning. By creating a proper agent, I will be able to showcase it in a YouTube video with the hope that some client somewhere may find it useful enough to pay for me as well as pay for Microsoft licensing, a win-win.

I guess I will have to increase my investment fund, and sign-up for 'M365 Production Tenant + M365 Prod License Business or Enterprise + M365 Copilot + M365 Copilot Studio'. Seems like this type of development is a luxury only few could afford.

Just thought to share as this may be useful for others trying to do the same.