GitHub Copilot to Move to Usage-Based Billing on June 1

One week after confirming that GitHub Copilot will move to a usage-based billing model, Microsoft has set a date for the transition: June 1.

“Today, we are announcing that all GitHub Copilot plans will transition to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026,” Microsoft’s Mario Rodriguez writes. “Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage. Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model.”

This change “aligns” GitHub Copilot with actual usage, Microsoft notes, in a confirmation that it was essentially subsidizing the service in the past, and especially for the heaviest users. And as it did in 2008 when it launched Azure (as Windows Azure), it will provide customers with preview bills in May so that they can see what the new pricing will look like.

“Copilot is not the same product it was a year ago,” Rodriguez claims. “It has evolved from an in-editor assistant into an agentic platform capable of running long, multi-step coding sessions, using the latest models, and iterating across entire repositories. Agentic usage is becoming the default, and it brings significantly higher compute and inference demands … GitHub has absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage, but the current premium request model is no longer sustainable. Usage-based billing fixes that. It better aligns pricing with actual usage, helps us maintain long-term service reliability, and reduces the need to gate heavy users.”

You can learn more about the change on the GitHub blog.