GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

_pdp_

There is noticeable trend across all agentic coding platforms that this situation is no longer sustainable. With this kind of pricing (sonnet 4.6 has 9x multiplier, previously 1x) it begs the question why use Copilot to begin with. You could easily just buy the tokens directly and have a lot more choice as well.

my002

The era of subsidised inference is truly ending. The new model multipliers ( https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing... ) seem like a huge leap, though. From 1x to 6x for new-ish GPT and Sonnet models. 27x for Opus... Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.

Ilaurens

"Your plan pricing is unchanged: Copilot Pro remains $10/month and Pro+ remains $39/month, and each includes $10 and $39 in monthly AI Credits, respectively." If there's no discount on credits (in terms of tokens per dollar) over other providers, I'm going to switch to a PAYG provider. If there's a month where there's little to no coding I can pocket the 10$. What incentive do they give to stay with this plan?

Ronsenshi

Just got an email with this announcement. I have Copilot Pro that I use occasionally, but not enough to tell how the switch to per use would affect my usage. Based on description Pro plan users will get $10 in monthly AI Credits, but that seems rather low compared to what you could use same plan until now.

metahost

Here goes my Copilot Pro subscription then, reluctantly heading over to Codex CLI since the CC base plan is downright unusable.

twistedcheeslet

End of an era for predictable costs as a small business. We will refer to these times as ‘the good old days’.

999900000999

Well. Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot. "To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare." Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.

redsaber

some of Github's open source maintainers have lost their free github copilot pro, guess this is really the next step for them to save cost in their infrastructure.

everfrustrated

Current multipliers vs from June Opus 4.6 3x -> 27x Opus 4.7 3x -> 27x GPT 5.4 1x -> 6x EDIT: only applies to annual plans

netule

I pay for Copilot annually, and mostly for its code auto completion features. I use CC if I want to do anything agentic. Not sure if I want to pay more for occasionally-good-intellisense at this point.

alecsm

So I guess from now on GH Copilot is only worth it if you want a quality autocomplete in VSCode.

thinkingtoilet

People need to wake up and stop being surprised by these billing increases. I see it on every update of every model. This was all subsidized by VC and company money. Now they need a return and the prices will keep going up. Be glad that you took advantage of that up until now, but can we stop the pearl clutching when we all know the amount of money being dumped into AI and the lackluster returns?

sefrost

I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code. Turns out there’s a GitHub Copilot CLI! I thought I was pretty familiar with available options, but no one in my circles ever mentions this product. It doesn’t seem to have much mindshare. Has anyone used it? What’s your experience? https://github.com/features/copilot/cli

silverwind

TLDR: It's a 6-9x price increase

4ndrewl

"Plan prices aren’t changing.” Isn't this like saying "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo is now a Honda. But the price hasn't changed!"

herrj

cursor, windsurf, and CC are all already on usage-based models so I guess what really matters is whether Copilot's GitHub integration depth justifies the price per token vs the alternatives

grey-area

How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?

ReptileMan

I really don't understand why OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft are in competition to see which one of the three will elevate deepseek the most.

simonw

Windsurf made a similar change in March: https://docs.windsurf.com/windsurf/accounts/quota > In March 2026, Windsurf replaced the credit-based system with a quota-based usage system. Instead of buying and spending credits, your plan now includes a daily and weekly usage allowance that refreshes automatically. With hindsight, per-request pricing makes no sense at all if an agent can burn a widely varying amount of tokens satisfying that request. These pricing plans were designed before coding agents changed the dynamics of token usage.

semiquaver

Whose idea was this “premium request” model anyway? If you’re going to invent a new metric used to bill, why not align it with what, even at the time, was a clear underlying cost structure that GitHub actively chose to ignore for a more confusing system.