GitHub Copilot Is Switching to Usage-Based Billing on June 1

GitHub Copilot is dropping the premium request model on June 1 and replacing it with usage-based billing. Every paid Copilot plan will shift to GitHub AI Credits, where one credit equals $0.01 USD and consumption is tied directly to token usage across whichever models you use.

The announcement landed on April 27. GitHub has been building toward this for a while — Copilot has grown from an autocomplete tool into something that runs multi-hour autonomous coding sessions, and the flat-rate model could not keep up.

What Changes

Right now, Copilot plans bundle a certain number of “premium requests” — interactions that use more capable models. Once you exhaust them, you either stop or pay more. Starting June 1, that counter goes away. Instead, each plan includes a monthly AI Credits allotment equal to the plan’s price:

Copilot Pro ($10/month): includes $10 in AI Credits
Copilot Pro+ ($39/month): includes $39 in AI Credits
Copilot Business ($19/user/month): includes $19 per seat in AI Credits
Copilot Enterprise ($39/user/month): includes $39 per seat in AI Credits

When you exhaust your credit allotment, you can buy more at published per-model rates. Credits are consumed based on token usage — input tokens, output tokens, and cached tokens — against the API rates for whichever model handled the request.

Frontier models cost more per credit than lightweight ones. GitHub hasn’t published a full per-model credit table in the announcement, but the guidance is that you can stretch your budget by choosing lighter models for routine tasks.

What Stays Unlimited

Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions stay unlimited on all paid plans and do not consume AI Credits. These two features — the bread-and-butter autocomplete that Copilot built its user base on — are outside the new billing system entirely.

Why GitHub Is Doing This

The honest framing from GitHub is that the economics don’t work otherwise. As Copilot has added autonomous agents and multi-step sessions, a quick code explanation and a four-hour refactor have cost the same amount under the old model. GitHub absorbed that gap in inference costs, but says the premium request model is “no longer sustainable” as the product scales.

Usage-based billing fixes the misalignment: heavy agentic usage costs more, quick edits cost less.

Early May: Preview Tool

Before the June 1 cutover, GitHub is launching a billing preview tool in early May. It shows a side-by-side comparison of your actual spend under the current model versus your estimated cost under AI Credits. The data stays local — nothing is uploaded to a server — so you can see your projection without sharing usage data externally.

For Business and Enterprise teams, June through August will include promotional bonus credits to smooth the transition.

How Teams Are Reacting

The Visual Studio Magazine headline from April 27 summed up the developer sentiment pretty bluntly: “You Will Get Less, but Pay the Same Price.” The concern is that users who were getting generous usage on flat-rate plans will now face hard limits once their credit allotment runs out, without any price reduction to offset it.

GitHub’s counterargument is that most users who interact with Copilot through chat and completions won’t notice a difference. The billing change primarily affects agentic and heavy model users — exactly the people who were previously getting an implicit subsidy.

There’s also a structural change for organizations: pooled credits and admin budget controls let team admins cap spending per seat or set department-level ceilings. That’s an improvement over the current model, where individual overages are harder to manage at scale.

What to Do Before June 1

If you are on an annual Copilot Pro or Pro+ plan, you stay on your existing plan with premium request pricing until your plan expires. Month-to-month subscribers switch over on June 1.

The practical move before then is to use the preview tool when it launches and understand how your usage maps to the new system. If your team runs long agentic sessions regularly, you may need to budget for extra credits or adjust which models you use by default.

Sources: GitHub Blog — Copilot is moving to usage-based billing, GitHub Docs — Preparing for usage-based billing, The Register — Microsoft’s GitHub shifts to metered AI billing