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ZDNET's key takeaways
- GitHub shifts pricing for its flagship Copilot service.
- Under the new AI Credit approach, if you run out of credits, you can't use the service.
- Users who expect to see far higher prices already hate the deal.
It's been an open secret that people haven't been paying anything like the full cost for their AI services. The bill's finally coming due. GitHub announced that as of June 1, 2026, all GitHub Copilot plans will shift to usage-based billing.
This is a radical change from its current premium request unit (PRU) system. Going forward, users will consume monthly allotments of GitHub AI Credits based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens at published API rates. In other words, GitHub is moving to a token-based pricing model.
Smart people saw this coming. A week ago, GitHub blocked users from getting a new GitHub Copilot subscription. GitHub also began restricting the models available from its individual subscription plans, while dropping access to Opus models entirely. Price increases were clearly on their way.
Why? According to GitHub, it's no longer the same service. What was once a smart programming editor has evolved into “an agentic platform capable of running long, multi-step coding sessions, using the latest models, and iterating across entire repositories.” On top of that, “Agentic usage is becoming the default, and it brings significantly higher compute and inference demands.”
GitHub claims its current premium request model is unsustainable. After all, they stated, “a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount,” with GitHub absorbing escalating inference costs. The usage-based model is intended to maintain long-term service reliability.
The good news is that, for now, anyway, base subscription pricesremain unchanged. Copilot Pro is staying at $10 per month, and Pro+ is at $39 per month. However, these subscriptions will now include monthly AI Credits matching their dollar value. That is, Pro subscribers receive $10 in credits, while Pro+ users receive $39. I have no idea why GitHub felt the need to spell this out.
Code completions and Next Edit suggestions will remain included without consuming AI Credits. Users on annual plans will continue with PRU-based pricing until expiration, when they transition to Copilot Free with upgrade options, or they can convert early to monthly plans with prorated credits.
Copilot Business, $19 per user per month, and Copilot Enterprise. $39 per user per month, maintain their current pricing while adding equivalent monthly AI Credits per seat. To ease the transition, GitHub will provide promotional credits for June, July, and August 2026: Business customers receive $30 per month, and Enterprise users receive $70 per month.
However, and this is important, in the past, when you ran out of PRUs, you simply downshifted to a less capable model. With the new AI Credits approach, when you're out of Credits, you're out of luck. If you want to keep working, you'll need to pay more for Credits.
Organizations can benefit from pooled usage across teams, eliminating stranded capacity from individual unused credits. Administrators will gain budget controls at the enterprise, cost center, and user levels, with options to allow additional purchases or cap spending when included pools are exhausted.
GitHub plans to launch a preview of the bills in early May. This will give you a look at your projected costs before the new June bills come due.
Many users aren't waiting to dismiss this new pricing plan as a bad deal. As one Reddit poster put it, “I don't see companies going to be all happy if they get a 50x larger bill. People really underestimate how many tokens they use.” Another shrugged, “They could've just shut down Copilot completely. Literally the only reason to stay is that you're familiar with it and are not ready to invest 30 minutes of your life to get familiar with Claude code, Codex, or whatever.”
For all the grumbling, though, it's not like the news is surprising. People who paid attention to AI's growing costs — memory is more expensive than ever, and gigawatt datacenters don't build themselves — knew this was coming.
Other companies have already started to hike their rates. For example, OpenAI increased the cost for developers using its flagship GPT-5.2 model from $1.25 per input token in the previous GPT-5.1 to $5.75. In addition, Anthropic confirmed a de facto price increase for its Claude enterprise edition on April 15 when it moved from fixed pricing to a dynamic usage-based model.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Like it or lump it, the day of cheap AI is almost done. I expect costs to jump by 2 to 3 times by year's end, and I won't be surprised if prices end up far higher than that.
