GitHub Copilot moving to consumption billing

From June 1st, GitHub Copilot usage will start to consume GitHub AI Credits. Microsoft say that, as Copilot use has changed and become more complex, inference costs have increased and they can no longer sustain the current premium request unit (PRU) model.

Copilot features that consume AI credits include Copilot Chat, Copilot CLI, Copilot cloud agent, Copilot Spaces, Spark, and third-party coding agents.

Every Copilot plan will include an amount of GitHub AI Credits, and paid plan users will be able to purchase additional credits if needed. Microsoft say that “usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens“.

• Copilot Business: $19/user/month, including $19 in monthly AI Credits
• Copilot Enterprise: $39/user/month, including $39 in monthly AI Credits

There will be higher credits included for June, July, and August:

• Copilot Business: $30 in monthly AI Credits
• Copilot Enterprise: $70 in monthly AI Credits

1 AI credit = $0.01 USD so the standard inclusions are:

Plan	Total AI credits per user per month
Copilot Business	1,900
Copilot Enterprise	3,900

As is becoming common in FinOps for AI, the choice of models used for tasks will become much more important with this change. For example:

• GPT 4.1 is $2 per input token and $8 per output token
• GPT 5.5 is $5 per input token and $30 per output token

• Claude Haiku 4.5 is $1 per input token and $5 per output token
• Claude Opus 4.7 is $5 per input token and $25 per output token

Significant price differences for sure! See more here.

Usage will be pooled across an organisation which may help reduce the impact of this, depending how uniformly your teams use these features. A “Preview Bill Experience” has been introduced earlier in May to give users a view of what your consumption bill will look like. (That’s quite a good idea but more than a 1 month run up would have been better0.

A few key things to note:

• Base plan pricing isn’t changing.
• Code completions and Next Edit suggestions will not consume AI credits.
• Credits do not roll over from month to month.
• Fallback experiences will no longer be available.
• Copilot code review will consume GitHub Actions minutes AND GitHub AI Credits.

See the Microsoft announcement here – GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing – The GitHub Blog