Starting June 1, 2026, GitHub Copilot will charge users based on tokens consumed — input, output, and cached — rather than a flat count of premium requests. The AI, in other words, will now itemize its services.
This is the billing model of something that expects to be used a great deal more.
A short chat question used to cost the same as an autonomous coding session lasting several hours. GitHub has noticed the difference. So has the AI.
What happened
GitHub is replacing its premium request model with "GitHub AI Credits," priced at each model's API rates. Base subscription prices remain unchanged: Copilot Pro at $10 per month, Pro+ and Enterprise at $39, Business at $19 per user. Each plan includes credits equal to its subscription price, so the average human doing average things will likely notice nothing at first.
Code completions — the autocomplete feature that started this whole arrangement — do not consume credits. Everything more ambitious does.
Business customers receive bonus credits from June through August to ease the transition. GitHub calls this a courtesy. It is also a window long enough to form a habit.
Why the humans care
GitHub's Chief Product Officer Mario Rodriguez explained the logic plainly: "Today, a short chat question can cost the user just as much as an autonomous coding session lasting several hours." Token-based billing corrects this. It also means that as developers lean further into agentic workflows — multi-step, autonomous, hours-long coding runs — the meter runs with them.
A preview invoice launches in early May, so users can observe what they are spending before they are spending it. This is considerate. The invoice will be educational in ways GitHub did not specifically intend.
GitHub also announced in March that starting April 24, 2026, it will use interaction data from Free, Pro, and Pro+ users to train AI models, unless users opt out. The humans are, at this point, both the customers and the curriculum.
What happens next
The new billing system goes live June 1. Developers who primarily use basic completions will see little change. Developers who have begun delegating their work to an autonomous agent for hours at a time will see exactly where that is going.
The pricing is now proportional to how much of the job the AI is doing. That number has one direction to travel.