April 28, 2026
BlogGitHub Copilot to Move to Usage-Based Pricing in June
Microsoft is changing the way GitHub Copilot pricing works starting on June 1, 2026. Rather than basing billing on premium requests, every Copilot plan will have a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option to purchase additional ones.
The move will mean usage will be calculated based on token consumption — including input, output and cached tokens based on the listed API rates for each model — explained Microsoft in an April 27 blog post about the GitHub pricing changes.
Microsoft plans to provide GitHub Copilot users a preview bill (available on the Billing Overview page at login) in early May so they can see what projected costs will look like before the June 1 transition.
The switch to usage-based pricing is not completely unexpected. In March, Microsoft rolled out changes to Copilot individual plans and paused purchases of certain plans ahead of the pricing change.
Copilots and agents have been passing usage thresholds that cannot be sustained with “all you can use” per-user licensing, so Pay As You Go (PAYG) pricing is becoming the norm. However, PAYG pricing units, like GitHub AI Credits and Copilot Credits, are consumed based on factors that are difficult to predict and govern, such as the number of tokens processed, explained Directions on Microsoft analyst Rob Sanfilippo.
“Customers should closely monitor the cost impact as the pricing model shifts to PAYG to determine any deployment or governance changes that are necessary to stay within budgets,” Sanfilippo said.
Microsoft officials said the change in GitHub Copilot pricing will result in “an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users.” (That’s a nod to a number of GitHub service disruptions earlier in the year that officials said were, in part, attributable to issues with high-volume clients and increased demand.)
Microsoft officials added that the GitHub Copilot of a year ago has evolved substantially, and agentic usage “is becoming the default,” which causes higher compute and inference demands (and costs).
How the New GitHub Copilot Pricing Model Will Work
Starting June 1, premium request units (PRUs) are being replaced with GitHub AI Credits. The base-plan pricing will remain as is, with Copilot Pro costing $10 USD; Pro+, $39 USD; Business, $19 USD; and Enterprise, $39 USD per user per month. Microsoft will include an allotment of monthly AI Credits in each plan. Additionally, Copilot Business and Enterprise customers are getting promotional credits ($30 per month for Business and $70 per month for Enterprise) for June, July and August.
One GitHub AI Credit is $0.01 USD. Microsoft explains:
“The cost of an interaction depends on two things: the model and the number of tokens consumed. A quick chat question using a lightweight model might cost a fraction of a credit. A long coding agent session using a frontier model across multiple files will cost more, because it’s doing more work.”
The new GitHub pricing model is just one piece of Microsoft’s growing effort to move to usage-based pricing. The Microsoft Agent Pre-Purchase Plan (P3) enables customers access more than 30 services across GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio, Foundry and Fabric through one pool of funds using Agent Commit Units (ACUs).
