GitHub Copilot Switches to Token-Based Billing Starting June 1, Monthly Fees Unchanged

Gate News message, April 28 — GitHub announced that all Copilot plans will transition to token-based billing effective June 1, 2026. The existing “premium request” pricing model will be replaced by GitHub AI Credits, with usage calculated based on actual token consumption (including input, output, and cached tokens) at rates matching each model’s public API pricing.

The monthly subscription fees remain unchanged: Pro at $10/month, Pro+ at $39/month, Business at $19/user/month, and Enterprise at $39/user/month. Monthly fees now represent the included AI Credits amount, with overage available at public rates. Code completion and Next Edit Suggestions will not consume credits. The previous fallback mechanism that automatically switched to lower-cost models after premium requests were exhausted will be replaced by credit balance and administrator budget controls.

Enterprise customers receive a three-month transition period from June to August. Business users will receive $30 in credits monthly (versus $19 in the standard period), while Enterprise users will receive $70 monthly (versus $39 standard). GitHub is introducing organization-level pooled usage, allowing unused credits to be shared within organizations, with administrators able to set budget limits at the enterprise, cost center, and user levels. An estimated billing feature will launch in early May to help users forecast expenses before the formal transition.

This change follows recent policy tightening. On April 20, GitHub suspended new registrations for personal Pro, Pro+, and Student plans, tightened usage limits, and removed Claude Opus from Pro. On April 22, it paused self-service Copilot Business registration for Free and Team organizations. GitHub attributed the changes to agentic workflows, which enable models to spawn sub-agents and run parallel long-running tasks, causing single-session compute costs to frequently exceed entire plan pricing. The company stated that after implementing token-based billing, it will relax previous usage restrictions. Annual subscription users will maintain their current billing method until plan expiration, after which they will transition to Copilot Free or can switch to monthly billing and receive remaining annual fees as credits.