GitHub just announced that all Copilot plans will transition to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026. The flat-fee, request-based model is going away. In its place: GitHub AI Credits, consumed based on actual token usage across input, output, and cached tokens. Honestly? This was only a matter of time.

What’s Actually Changing

Right now, Copilot plans bundle a fixed number of “premium requests” per month. Pro ($10/month) includes 300 premium requests, and Pro+ ($39/month) includes 1,500. Three models, GPT-4.1, GPT-4o, and GPT-5 mini, are “included” and cost zero premium requests regardless of how much you use them. Only switching to advanced models like Claude Sonnet, Gemini 2.5 Pro, or GPT-5 draws from your monthly allowance. Once you burn through your requests, you either pay $0.04 per additional request (if you’ve set an overage budget) or fall back to the included models.

Starting June 1, that system gets replaced. Each plan now includes a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, and usage is calculated based on token consumption at the published API rate for each model. Base plan prices are NOT changing. Pro stays at $10/month, Pro+ at $39, Business at $19/user, and Enterprise at $39/user. Code completions and Next Edit suggestions still don’t consume credits. But heavier usage, like agent mode and chat with advanced models, will now draw from your credit balance.

If you need more, you buy more. That’s the new deal.

Why Request-Based Billing Was Always Broken

The flat-fee model made sense when Copilot was mostly autocomplete. A few inline suggestions here, a chat message there. Predictable, low cost per user, easy to package.

Then agentic workflows arrived. Long-running sessions, parallelized tasks, multi-step reasoning chains. To reflect compute costs, GitHub introduced model multipliers: Claude Opus 4.7, for example, costs 7.5x per prompt, meaning in just a couple of conversations you can potentially drain most of your 300 monthly requests. Some preview models previously carried multipliers as high as 30x. GitHub themselves admitted that the week-over-week cost of running Copilot nearly doubled since the start of 2026. A handful of agentic requests were regularly exceeding the entire monthly plan price. You cannot run a sustainable product when a small percentage of power users can consume 10x or 50x the compute for the same flat fee.

That’s not a pricing quirk. That’s a structural problem. And the only real fix is to tie what users pay to what they actually use.

The Power User Problem

The heavy users are not bad actors. They’re just using the product the way GitHub wants them to. Agents are the future of Copilot, and GitHub has been actively pushing developers toward agentic workflows. But those workflows are EXPENSIVE to run, and the old pricing model had no mechanism to recover that cost from the users generating it.

Under request-based billing, a developer running complex multi-turn agent sessions was essentially subsidized by everyone paying $10/month for light autocomplete use. That’s not fair to casual users, and it’s not viable for GitHub long-term. Usage-based billing puts each user’s cost in proportion to their actual consumption.

What Developers Should Watch

The transition looks smooth for most users. Light to moderate Copilot users will probably spend less than or equal to their current plan price once they switch, since credits map directly to what they consume. The ones who need to pay attention are power users running heavy agentic workflows regularly. For them, costs may go up.

GitHub is also launching a preview billing dashboard in early May so users can see projected costs before the June 1 switchover. That’s a smart move. Surprise bills are the fastest way to lose developer trust.

Wrapping Up

This was not a decision GitHub made lightly, but it was clearly the right one. Flat-rate pricing for a product whose underlying compute cost can vary by 100x depending on usage is not a business model. It’s a liability. Usage-based billing aligns incentives properly: light users pay less, heavy users pay for what they consume, and GitHub can keep the service reliable for everyone.

If you’re a current Copilot user, check the billing preview in May and get a sense of where you’ll land. If you’re on an annual plan, you’re grandfathered until expiry. And if this pricing model doesn’t work for you, GitHub has confirmed you can cancel and get a prorated refund before May 20.

You can read the official announcement here: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilot-is-moving-to-usage-based-billing/

And you can view how the “old” pricing model was structured here: https://www.webdeveducation.com/github-copilot-premium-requests-explained/