GitHub Copilot price shake-up

GitHub said on April 27 that Copilot will move to usage-based billing on June 1, replacing premium requests with token-metered GitHub AI Credits. (github.blog) The company said usage will be calculated from input, output, and cached tokens using published model rates, with a billing preview arriving in early May. (github.blog) GitHub kept headline subscription prices unchanged: Copilot Pro stays at $10 a month, Pro+ at $39, Business at $19 per user, and Enterprise at $39 per user. (github.blog) (docs.github.com) Some core features still stay outside the meter. GitHub said code completions and Next Edit Suggestions remain included in all plans and do not consume AI Credits. (github.blog) The expensive part is the newer kind of Copilot work. GitHub said the product has shifted from an in-editor assistant to an agentic platform that can run long, multi-step coding sessions across whole repositories. (github.blog) That change had already started showing up in the plans. On April 20, GitHub paused new sign-ups for Pro, Pro+, and Student, tightened usage limits, and removed Opus models from the Pro tier. (github.blog) GitHub said those limits were added after long-running, parallelized sessions began consuming far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support. The company said weekly limits were introduced to control requests that ran for extended periods and created “prohibitively high costs.” (github.blog) Before this week’s shift, Copilot’s published plan table still framed usage around monthly premium requests: 300 for Pro, 1,500 for Pro+, 300 per Business seat, and 1,000 per Enterprise seat. (docs.github.com) GitHub had already been charging beyond the bundle in some cases. Its billing docs say extra premium requests above plan limits cost $0.04 each for eligible individual subscribers. (docs.github.com) The new system also drops an old safety valve. GitHub said users who exhausted premium requests previously could fall back to a lower-cost model, but future usage will be governed by available credits and admin budget controls. (github.blog) GitHub’s message is that Copilot now behaves less like a flat-rate autocomplete tool and more like a metered cloud service. Starting June 1, the bill will follow the size of the workload. (github.blog)