Report: GitHub Copilot is moving to token-based billing from June

Following a temporary pause on new Pro and Student sign-ups, reports confirm that GitHub will transition to a token-based consumption model soon.

Earlier this week, Microsoft surprised everyone by announcing that it is temporarily pausing new sign-ups for GitHub Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans so that it can better serve existing customers more effectively. Also, they announced reduced usage limits for individual plans and the removal of Claude Opus models from Pro plans.

With improved AI models and their agentic capabilities, the usage of GitHub Copilot has skyrocketed over the past few months. This is not specific to GitHub Copilot; in the last few weeks, Anthropic, the current leader in the AI coding market, started imposing several new restrictions and reduced usage limits as well.

The subscription model for AI coding seems to be coming to an end. The $20–$30 per month pricing seems to be unsustainable even for large AI companies including Microsoft and Anthropic. While Anthropic has already moved to token-based billing for enterprise customers, GitHub Copilot is also trying to move in the same direction.

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At today confirmed that GitHub Copilot is moving to token-based billing from June 1st. The official announcement is expected to be made this week. Right now, GitHub Copilot users have a certain amount of “requests” depending on the subscription plan. For example, the Pro plan offers 300 requests a month, while the Pro+ plan offers 1,500 requests.

Instead of using “requests,” GitHub Copilot users will pay for the actual cost of input and output tokens. For example, if the GPT-5.4 model is selected, developers need to pay $2.50 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens.

To get access to the GitHub Copilot platform, users will pay a monthly subscription as usual. But instead of a certain number of premium requests, they will receive a certain number of AI tokens based on their subscription level. Enterprise GitHub Copilot users will have “pooled” AI credits which can be shared across the organization.

As per Ed Zitron, GitHub Copilot Business customers paying $19/month will get $30 of pooled AI credits, while Copilot Enterprise customers paying $39/month will receive $70 of pooled AI credits.

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Posted Thursday 23 April 2026 at 5:39 pm AEST (my time).

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