All GitHub Copilot plans are now on usage-based billing [FAQ] #197089
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Hello GitHub Community, Important Effective June 16, 2026: We're reopening sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Student, Pro, Pro+, and Max plans gradually over the next couple of weeks for new subscribers. If you've been waiting to get started with Copilot, select the plan that fits your needs. If you find that you're using more than what's included in your current plan, we've made some updates to help you get the best experience:
If your preferred option isn't available yet, check back soon & review the FAQ below for additional answers. 📍 Frequently Asked QuestionsWhy can’t I sign up right now?New sign-ups are opening gradually as we put safeguards in place to address abuse patterns we saw under the previous billing model. This allows us to ensure Copilot remains a reliable, high-quality experience for all users. What options do I have to continue using Copilot once I've hit my additional usage spending limit?You have two options:
What does it look like in practice to upgrade? Can you give an example of what the flow looks like?When you hit your additional usage spending limit on Copilot Pro, you'll see options to either pay as you go (settle your $29 in accrued additional usage to continue on Pro) or upgrade to Pro+ (pay a $29 upgrade fee, and receive the $70 Pro+ credits minus your total current usage). The upgrade fee is designed so your total spend matches what a new Pro+ signup would pay. For example: Mona has a Copilot Pro subscription and has hit their spending limit after $5.00 USD in additional usage. Mona can either choose to pay down the $5 in additional usage or can upgrade to Pro+. If Mona upgrades to Pro+, Mona will be charged $29.00 USD to upgrade and receive $50 (70 AI Credits from Pro+ - ($15 AI Credits from Pro + $5 of additional usage) in AI Credits to use for the remaining month. Will we always have to upgrade to a more expensive plan?No. We are rolling out a Pay as you Go option that allows you to pay for additional usage on your current plan without upgrading. When you hit your additional usage spending limit, you'll be presented with both options: upgrade to the next plan for more included usage, or pay as you go to continue on your current plan. The upgrade path offers better per-dollar value through included credits, while pay as you go gives you flexibility to stay on your current plan. Why do I have to pay first? Why can’t I just continue to use Copilot and pay when the month is over?Pay as you Go helps protect against unpredictable costs. Postpaid billing can lead to unexpectedly large bills at the end of the month, and requiring payment upfront—combined with spending limits and the usage dashboard—helps avoid that. You can also upgrade to the next plan tier for higher included usage and spending limits. 📍Usage-based billingEffective June 1, 2026: Usage-based billing is now in effect for all GitHub Copilot plans. Please refer to our initial announcement and today’s changelog for more details. What are the additional usage limits? How much additional usage can users purchase?The limits increase by plan, so the limits for users on a Pro+ plan will generally be higher than those for users on a Pro plan. They also vary depending on a user’s usage patterns, billing history, and verification states for their GitHub account. These limits are subject to change, and you’ll see an in-product notification when you hit a limit. How will we know when we hit an additional usage spending limit?You will get an in-product notification when you hit the additional usage spending limit. Why do the spending limits vary? Why are some users treated differently?Limits vary by plan tier and account signals, including usage patterns, billing history, and verification state, to protect service reliability and prevent abuse. How exactly are you determining the amount of a user’s additional usage spending limit? What's the specific criteria?We look at a variety of factors, including usage and payment history with GitHub. We can’t disclose specifics, as it would give bad actors more details to work with to circumvent our safeguards. If I upgrade to a more expensive plan but then decide to downgrade, what does that look like? Are there any restrictions on when I can downgrade?You can downgrade at any point. The downgrade will be a “delayed downgrade” where you will stay in the current, more expensive plan until your next billing cycle. Then you will be charged for the downgraded plan and the lower included usage will take effect the next calendar month. Please note that if you upgrade from a Student plan to a paid plan, downgrading will take you to a Free plan and you will need to reapply for Student plan. You said you’d loosen restrictions once usage-based billing is in effect, but sign-ups for new users are still paused. What’s going on?We understand the frustration. Usage-based billing is now in effect, but we’ve needed additional time to put safeguards in place to ensure a reliable experience for all users. We plan to re-enable new sign-ups for all Copilot plans in the coming weeks. Will you continue to offer flex AI Credits after the current promotion ends?Flex allotments may vary from month to month. They’re designed to adapt as the economics of AI evolve, including model pricing, new models, and improvements in efficiency. How can I use the enhanced model capabilities like the 1M context window?These will be available in Copilot CLI and VS Code. In Copilot CLI, once you select a model you’ll be asked if you want default or long context. Select long context for the 1M context window. In VS Code, you can configure this through a separate context size dropdown menu. Why should I pay GitHub API prices when I can just go pay the model provider directly?Copilot gives you a single subscription across every model family we support, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI , with model availability varying by plan— without managing separate API keys, billing relationships, or rate limits with each provider. You get one bill, one set of usage controls, and access to all of it across VS Code, the Copilot CLI, the Copilot SDK, Copilot Code Review, and tools like OpenCode — without configuring each one separately. For a lot of developers, the value isn't just "access to a model." It's that Copilot is deeply integrated into the tools they already use: pull requests, code review, the editor, the terminal. That integration work, including the context from your repo, your PR diff, your open files, and more, is what turns a model call into something more useful. Will users continue to see the same level of restrictive rate limiting we’ve seen over the past few months?We’ve loosened rate limits considerably, and users should not experience them with normal use. Can I set up budgets at the user-level for my organization?Yes, admins can now set a universal budget for users or override for specific sets of users. As users approach their budgets, admins will receive email notifications and can adjust budgets anytime from their billing settings. See our budget management documentation for details. |
Replies: 580 comments 807 replies
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So the answer is basically: if you hit your limit too quickly, you should upgrade and pay more? I get why GitHub moved to usage-based billing, but the numbers feel way off compared to the previous system. I had only two short sessions in the VS Code extension, with maybe 2–4 prompts total, and somehow that already consumed 210.5 AI Credits/Tokens/Whatever. Under the old model, that kind of usage would barely make a dent in my monthly quota. Now it feels like a handful of normal interactions can burn through a noticeable percentage of the month's allowance. What worries me, and most of the users, isn't paying for usage. It's not knowing what a few everyday prompts are going to cost. If developers can't reasonably predict their consumption, it's hard to trust Copilot as a tool they'll use throughout the month. Honestly, this feels like the kind of change that pushes people to look at other providers or even go directly to the model vendors instead of using Copilot as their main AI tool. More transparency around how credits are consumed in real-world VS Code workflows would go a long way. |
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My GitHub account is associated with Fu-Jie, and I have been a long-time annual subscriber. My annual membership was originally set to expire in approximately two months. Earlier today (June 1, 2026), I clicked the "Refund" button in my account settings out of curiosity—not with the intention of immediately cancelling. I expected this action would lead to a confirmation page, not process the refund directly. However, the refund was executed immediately without any secondary confirmation prompt. I believe this is a design flaw in the refund workflow. Any action affecting payment and subscription status should include an explicit confirmation step to prevent unintended consequences from accidental clicks or exploratory actions. The absence of this basic safeguard led to the unexpected cancellation of my membership. To clarify: My request is not about renewal, but about the value of my current active contract. My existing membership had not yet expired and still had nearly two months of service remaining. Given recent changes to GitHub's billing policies, the terms and benefits under my current contract hold unique value during this remaining period. Once refunded and cancelled, renewing would not provide the same conditions. Given the above, I request that my original membership status and expiration date be restored, and I strongly recommend that your team improve the refund process by adding a necessary confirmation step. I look forward to your reply. |
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Dumbest decision ever.... |
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Hm, wondering if there will be similar changes for the many Copilot variants in M365 and general Microsoft products in the future. |
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I had faith in you.. Honestly, I regret not taking the refund offer you made. I genuinely think you're going to lose at least 80% of your client base. This is so ridiculous. It's far better to pay in real money and not by token. The base usage is ridiculously low. |
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I'm using VS Code with GitHub Copilot and I chose LLM GPT 5.4 Mini, but the platform is deducting the cost of Gemini 3.5 Flash, and because of that, my credits are disappearing without me using them. |
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How in the hell can 1 prompt which last month would barly cost a cent, now take up $4.51. this is ununsable and needs rolling back. |
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So why has the Pro plan reduced its usage limit by almost 100 times compared to before? I also discovered that the |
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In case anyone is curious on the value comparison, this is what I am seeing on the $10 plan using GPT-5.4:
The 100 credits is an upper estimate of what I have been seeing if you assume larger prompts. I have seen as low as 10 credits and as high as 60 so far today. On average I seem to hover around 33 credits per prompt. |
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In the previous thread about Usage-based Billing it seemed that a common gripe people had was that unused tokens do not roll-over into the next month. To my knowledge, the topic was never addressed by GitHub. Are GitHub able to disclose the factors contributing to this decision? While GitHub make a valid point regarding the convenience of having one bill and one set of usage controls—I’ve opted to stick to Pro+, burn through my allocated credit in a week, and then pivot to using OpenRouter for the remainder of the month. OpenRouter offers a similar set of advantages that Copilot has over other providers. It can be used within the same VS Code interface. Plus it has more models and credit rolls-over for up to a year. |
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Posting here so I can still subscribe to the chaos |
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We are not the main target customer anymore. If you read the news, you can see that large companies are paying millions for this type of service, they don't need users like us. |
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Privacy-related requests: +1 877 448 4820 (also reachable at privacy@github.com) 6 |
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Unfortunately, Unfxcoin, you're right. You're going to have to sue. As a
business, you may have the legal resources to finance such a suit. There
are 1000s of singles out there getting the same treatment but who don't
have the resources to sue these guys themselves.
Given your losses (both direct with subscription fees and indirect with
idle staff and broken contracts) you could well have a significant legal
complaint. From the reception to your complaints so far, I suggest you
include a "mad dog-type" litigator rather than only standard, corporate
legal types.
Hopefully this would get their attention, get your money back without even
going to court, and open their eyes as to what is going on. They seem
blissfully unaware.
Ugh.
…On Sat, Aug 29, 2026 at 9:31 AM Unfxcoin ***@***.***> wrote:
Privacy-related requests: +1 877 448 4820 <(877)%20448-4820> (also
reachable at ***@***.***) 6
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I avoided rage posting about how I use all of my GH Copilot Pro+ subscription's AI credit allotment in less than 2 days after the pricing model was changed... This is likely due to the fact that I have taken the time to create large instruction files (community instructions plus my personal preferences and an experimental set of instructions for workflow, branching, work item management, etc.) and typically use the same thread throughout a work item. Nevertheless, I just wanted to echo what many are saying here: this is no longer an affordable product for me to use. I work for a very large company that announced a big AI initiative about a month before the pricing changes. They left our allotment of GH copilot credits unlimited for just over a month before announcing that they would be setting limits now (no doubt because their bill was astronomical). I guess we'll just have to wait for GH/MS to figure out how to make this affordable for us again. I appreciate the Visual Studio integration- that's why I used this in the first place. Yet today, it's just too damn expensive to use in complex workflows. |
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bence o kadar saçmaladı ki resmen para tutazağı oldu amacı dışında hareket ediyor.artık buna bir çözüm bülün habire ödeme yap ödeme yap şeklinde bıktım artık bir projeyi sonlandıramadan kaç kez ödeme yaptığımı unuttum.buna bir çözüm bulun artık yeter. |
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onca çabanın karşılığı bu olmamalı berbat bir hizmet bence para tuzağı verdiğimiz paraya karşı hak etmediğiniz bir ücret alıyorsunuz.bence gereksiz bunaldım artık öde öde öde yeter |
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This price model is so bad, I just switched my annual subscription to get access to Sonnet 5 as 4.5 and 4.6 are also retired giving me no choise considering I like the Claude models more than GPT. Now just in one day I've gone through all my available usage. And also maxed out paying for extra usage... This is really not a tool you can rely on. Now I have to pay to continue, I just really don't get this billing system with what feels like a billion parameters just to use AI... |
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I happily used CoPilot for months until the billing change booted me out
(like some of you). Using Claude (cline) now. This is not a "bargain" but
costs can be somewhat controlled by tying down what is used by the LLM in
cline's rules. Left on its own, cline will happily send a ton of
irrelevant
"stuff" to the LLM and this increases the costs (number of tokens) for a
transaction. To keep costs down you have to specify cline rules to tell it
to eliminate it.
For example, don't send duplicate files, don't send massive files with
useless junk when only a very small part is needed, etc. In addition to the
cline rules, you can tell it to ignore (cline ignore) categories of things,
like extra directories/folders with old, irrelevant material; using files
"above" the current folder, etc.
Getting a handle on this and using selected/cheaper models for easier
things helped cut down my costs to a more "reasonable" level. When in
doubt, I also tell cline to assess whether a given plan will run into
openrouter errors and if so to develop plan without errors.
…On Fri, Sep 11, 2026 at 4:17 PM Donny1717 ***@***.***> wrote:
That true sir
I burned through 1,500 credits in just six hours after the 5.6 update,
even though before this I barely used 200 credits per month.
That’s why I keep saying — don’t trust any of these systems until you’re
running everything inside your own environment.
Once they change the model, the token counter, or enable extra thinking
modes without telling you, your usage and costs can spike out of nowhere.
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The only thing we can do is cancel the subscription so Microsoft will wake up |
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@srgglobal From an administrator's seat, the missing artifact is less a communication pack and more a reconciliation rulebook: what got counted, under which unit, and what an invoice's numbers can be checked against. That's what we build in the open — AgentMeasure, a settlement-statement standard for AI usage billing. The concrete object is one page: confirmed units on one line, assumed ones on another, the dollar delta between the two readings, and a named rule behind every figure. Everything runs locally. As someone steering an org through this transition, your read on what's missing for admins would genuinely shape the draft — happy to send the one-pager. |
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@jakteixeiraf Worth pushing with support as a metering accuracy issue, not just a billing complaint: if the model that actually served the request differs from the one you selected, the deduction was computed against the wrong rate, and that's a disputable line item, not a quirk. For context, we audit AI usage metering in the open (110+ tools audited, 45+ verified bugs, 21 fixes merged upstream), and the recurring pattern is logical operations collapsing into physical units — retries, model reroutes and context reloads counted as fresh charges. If you can export request-level usage, separating what you selected from what was executed is exactly the check our conformance rules cover. The checker is free and runs locally. |
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@is-nakano That visibility gap is the one we hear most from org admins: the budget exists and money moves, but there is no per-user, per-unit breakdown you could hand to finance. We maintain an open settlement-statement standard for AI usage billing (github.com/roy-tong/AgentMeasure) — one page, confirmed vs assumed units, the dollar delta, a named rule behind every number, all computed locally. It does not read Copilot billing today; the rule structure is vendor-neutral, and pressure from practitioners like you is what decides which vendor ships a readable statement first. If you want to pressure-test the statement format against a real Copilot invoice, that is exactly the feedback loop we run. |
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Up |
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I switched away from subscription-based tools entirely. Now I just use jzstoken.com - pay-per-token, no monthly plans. $20 lasts me about 3 weeks. The best part is no surprise bills. I can see exactly what I'm spending. And if I have a light week, I don't feel like I'm wasting money on a subscription I barely used. Way better than the old "pay $20/month whether you use it or not" model. |
























🆕 Community Manager Update: June 16, 2026
Hello everyone,
We're reopening sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Student, Pro, Pro+, and Max plans gradually over the next couple of weeks for new subscribers. If you've been waiting to get started with Copilot, select the plan that fits your needs. If your preferred option isn't available yet, check back soon.
If you find that you're using more than what's included in your current plan, we've made some updates to help you get the best experience: upgrade to unlock more included usage or pay as you go and stay on your current plan.
We've updated the body of this discussion to reflect updates regarding new sign-ups, usage and billing. Please find answer…