GitHub Copilot Switches to Usage-Based Billing Today — Premium Requests Out, AI Credits In at a Penny Each

GitHub has switched Copilot to usage-based billing as of June 1, 2026, retiring the premium request units (PRUs) that have governed paid plans and replacing them with metered "GitHub AI Credits." Each credit is worth a fixed $0.01, so a $10 budget buys 1,000 credits. Instead of counting a flat number of premium requests, Copilot now draws down credits based on actual token consumption — input, output and cached tokens — at the published API rate for whichever model a developer invokes.

Every paid tier still ships with a monthly credit allotment equal to its price: Copilot Pro includes $10 in credits, Pro+ includes $39, Business is $19 per user and Enterprise is $39 per user, each bundling matching credits. Paid plans can buy additional usage once the included allotment runs out. To soften the transition, GitHub is giving Business and Enterprise customers enhanced credits for June through August only — $30 and $70 respectively — before the standard allotments take over.

Crucially, the everyday features most developers lean on are not metered. "Code completions and Next Edit suggestions remain included in all plans and do not consume AI Credits," GitHub confirmed — meaning inline autocomplete, the original Copilot pitch, stays unlimited. What burns credits is the heavier agentic work: chat, coding agents and multi-step model calls that have ballooned in compute cost as autonomous workflows become routine.

The migration is not uniform. Monthly subscribers are moved to usage-based billing automatically on June 1. Annual Copilot Pro and Pro+ subscribers sit in a more awkward spot: they stay on the existing premium request model until their term expires, but face higher model multipliers in the meantime, and only convert to credits — or fall back to the free tier — once their year runs out.

GitHub frames the shift as a matter of economics rather than choice. "Agentic usage is becoming the default, and it brings significantly higher compute and inference demands," said GitHub product leader Mario Rodriguez, with the company stating that "the current premium request model is no longer sustainable." It is the clearest signal yet that the era of all-you-can-eat AI coding subscriptions is ending — and it lands the same week Microsoft is expected to show off its own homegrown coding model for Copilot at Build.