GitHub Copilot Usage-Based Billing: Credits and Token Costs

Premium requests give way to metered credits

GitHub said Copilot would replace premium request units with GitHub AI Credits starting June 1, 2026. Instead of each premium request counting as one unit regardless of how long the underlying model session ran, credits are drawn down by actual token usage, input, output and cached tokens, priced at each model's published API rate. [1]

Subscription prices are unchanged, and each plan's monthly fee becomes its monthly credit allowance: $10 for Copilot Pro, $39 for Copilot Pro+, $19 per user for Copilot Business, and $39 per user for Copilot Enterprise. Business and Enterprise customers get a temporary boost, to $30 and $70 respectively, for June through August 2026. Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions stay included at no charge against the credit balance. [1]

Annual-plan subscribers keep the premium-request pricing they bought until their plan renews, at which point they move onto the credit system. GitHub also said the automatic fallback to a cheaper model when a premium one was unavailable would no longer apply, and that Copilot code review would begin consuming GitHub Actions minutes in addition to credits. [1]

A flat unit for sessions of wildly different cost

GitHub's stated reason is that Copilot stopped being the single-shot autocomplete tool it shipped in 2021 and became, in its own words, an agentic platform that runs long, multi-step coding sessions. Under the premium-request model a one-line chat question and an autonomous agent session running for hours on a single task consumed the identical one unit, and GitHub said it had been absorbing the growing gap between what those sessions actually cost in inference and what the flat unit charged for them. [1]

Atlas interpretation: The move brings Copilot's pricing in line with how the underlying compute is actually metered rather than how a code editor plugin has traditionally been sold. Every long-running coding agent that GitHub, Anthropic and others have shipped runs on the same token-priced infrastructure underneath a flat seat price, and Copilot's premium-request unit was a wrapper GitHub built to hide that from subscribers. Usage-based billing removes the wrapper instead of raising the seat price, which shifts the cost of heavy agent use from GitHub's margin onto whichever subscriber runs it. [1]

Developers read it as a price increase in disguise

Coverage of the change, and of its effect once it took hold on the June 1 start date, described developers on GitHub's community forum calling the switch a bait and switch, with some requesting refunds or cancelling subscriptions outright, and reporting that routine agent sessions burned through a monthly credit allowance far faster than the equivalent premium-request quota had. [2]

Atlas interpretation: GitHub held the sticker price constant while changing what a dollar buys, which is why users experienced it as a cut even though no monthly fee moved. A subscriber whose typical month leaned on short completions was largely unaffected; a subscriber running the multi-hour agent sessions GitHub cited as its reason for the change is exactly the one whose bill, in effective terms, went up. [2]