Update to GitHub Copilot Consumptive Billing Experience

[Akash1134]

Hello Copilot Community,

As of June 18th, monthly premium request allowances are now in effect for all paid Copilot plans.

What’s changed?

The monthly allowance of premium requests per user is now enforced for Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise plans. Premium requests unlock a selection of advanced AI models and features—usage varies by model.

What’s unchanged?

All paid plans still include unlimited use of GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o for agent mode and chat interactions, plus unlimited code completions! Please note that rate limits may still apply across all models.

Managing Your Premium Requests

• Monthly Allowances: These reset on the 1st of each month. For this first billing cycle, your premium request counters have all started fresh at zero.
• Pay-Per-Request Option: Need more premium requests? You can set a spending limit in your billing settings (default limit is $0).
• Usage & Billing Controls: Monitor your real-time premium request usage via the Copilot status icon in your IDE, or download detailed usage reports in your billing settings. If you have licenses from multiple organizations, you can select which entity to bill.

For all the details, check out our documentation.

We Want Your Feedback!

Have questions, comments, or suggestions? Your input helps shape the future of Copilot, please comment below.

Thank you for being a part of our community and helping us make Copilot even better!

[iwangbowen]

300 premium requests are not enough for pro plan

[wrek]

May we suggest the pro+ plan?
And coming soon the premium pro+ plan... Then I'm sure we'll see the enhanced premium pro Plus plan...

[knoopx]

300 per day is ok, per month is ridiculous

[sammcj]

Given Google's Gemini coding agent offers 1500-2000 requests per day on their free tier, I'd say 1000 "premium" (I'd argue - minimum required for agentic coding etc...) requests per month on a paid enterprise plan is most certainly not enough.

[wrek]

Cursor works better, is smoother and costs half as much as copilot. You get 500 requests I think, but extras are only $0.04 each - basically after you work through your $20 of prepaid credits, you can start paying the same rate for any overage.
These companies have no idea how fast this is all happening. Next month we'll have two new options, then 200. We are currently living in the profitable "$.75 per SMS" era of AI.
Prices will either skyrocket out of the hands of most individuals or bottom out and level the playing field.

Either way there are better options than Github Copilot where you don't have to click continue every 10 seconds or try telling the thing to get to work after it's confirmed it's getting to work 6 times.

[dawesi]

Considering you're also being billed for requests that had buggy code then you PAY AGAIN AND AGAIN to fix it, and copilot knows this, those additional requests where it says "your right i stuffed up" should be FREE, along with code that is complete garbage or does not follow instructions should be free. (it ai admits this, so then it should tag that request AUTOMATICALLY as 'wrong code' (rather than me trying to do it when i remember (happens so much i've started using thumbs up when it's right.

At one stage i had copilot give me the same 3 replies to the same query three times in a row, and asked it to /fix it in three different ways and it was like a goldfish and gve me the same three answers one at a time three times in a row. That's 10 claude requests for ONE answer. (and code was wrong,so probably 12-16 requests for ONE correct answer.

I'd say 70-80% of requests should be FREE at the moment.

There also needs to be a better triage system for requests so when you ask something simple it asks chatGPT then if it's complex it passes it off to Claude or o4-mini if it's a repetitive simple coding task. That would reduce most people's bills by 90%

[gadfly3173]

• Usage & Billing Controls: Monitor your real-time premium request usage via the Copilot status icon in your IDE, or download detailed usage reports in your billing settings. If you have licenses from multiple organizations, you can select which entity to bill.

The real-time premium request usage mentioned in the announcement is clearly still not available to all users. Why has this feature been delayed for so long?

[Akash1134]

Hi @gadfly3173 This could be a feature deployment delay, IDE restart might fix this.

[hayoshii]

It feels like instead of making Pro+ a better plan, you’ve simply made the Pro plan worse.
This change doesn’t enhance the value of higher tiers—it just limits existing functionality for paying users who expected more consistency in what they’re paying for.

[hayoshii]

This is my third year using Copilot, but to be honest, while more unnecessary services and features have been introduced, placing a 300-request cap feels quite unfair.

Since it doesn’t seem like this change will be rolled back, I’m considering switching to Cursor once my current annual Copilot subscription ends.
If you have any other recommendations, I’d be happy to hear them.

[raky291]

@hayoshii An alternative for me would be to use local models with Ollama + VSCode or Cursor.

[hayoshii]

@raky291 Thanks for your input!
Of course, I’ve been experimenting with local LLMs as well.
At first, I only intended to use them as a supplement to GitHub Copilot… but here we are.

[nijaru]

For API usage, I'd recommend the anthropic API directly for claude, otherwise openrouter is great for switching between whichever model you want to use.

If you want purely subscription based, not API billing, then claude code with a claude pro or higher sub, or else go local with something like ollama.

[hayoshii]

@nijaru Thanks! Claude Pro is definitely on my list of options, but OpenRouter sounds especially interesting.

[returnvoid]

Nothing exciting about this change. Pro plan looks pretty useless from now. I can see the real-time Premium requests and it's not cheap.
I'm not sure how competitve these prices are in comparison with similar services. I guess I need to figure that out on the go.

[BigBenJr]

I have the feeling that someone just cut my wings !

[jxu]

Sad if github copilot was your "wings"...

[yomajo]

What model should I set, to never worry about this limit ever (until similar announcement) again?

[JeetMajumdar2003]

GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o offer unlimited usage for the Pro Plan, while other models such as OAI, Claude, and Gemini have specific weights for premium request usage. For, using Claude-sonnet-4 (1x) allows 300 uses, while o4-mini/o3-mini (0.33x) permits 900 uses under the Plan, which includes 300 premium requests.
The Pro+, on the other hand, provides 1500 premium requests.

[knofte]

I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere. Gpt4.1 is not unlimited when it comes to premium requests, only chat.

On pro/pro+, you are still limited to 1500 premium requests even with gpt4.1.

[dawesi]

I was able to use gpt even when my premium requests ran out with $0 budget (but had to increase that to complete the code ai was helping me with)

also sick of requests that 'timeout' so they can use more credits for long running tasks

[lucvutuan]

im using a paid account (100$/year) and when I downloaded the usage report and I saw Unlimited in Total Monthly Quota, does this mean that this feature does not apply to my account so I do not have to worry about running out of requests?

[Akash1134]

Hi @lucvutuan Could you please restart your IDE and check again? The Total Monthly Quota should now be updated with the monthly premium request allowances in effect. Thanks!

[iamcjwilliams]

Hello @lucvutuan Can you also provide a screenshot with the timestamp ?

[TMRomain]

Crazy how when you guys set that 300 hundred limits, cursor update their pricing plan from 500 hundred request to become unlimited to better align with Claude Code and other LLM providers pricing's.

[BLTCPT]

I dont like it. Now VS Code for non dev has become less effective. IF you are going to charge to use a LLM, then users should be able to bring their own.

[matt-buchanan]

I run a GitHub Enterprise instance with Copilot for Business enabled. As far as I can tell none of the usage monitoring features are available. Is this by design? This is feeling pretty half-baked at this point - what am I supposed to tell my user base? They just have to guess how many requests they have left? Or are you seriously expecting my team to run a centralised report every time someone asks what their usage is like? If you at least had an API that'd be something, but I see you couldn't even work up the energy to implement that.

In case my feedback is not clear here - this is dire. You need to try harder - right now you're just signalling that you are not investing in enterprise users.

EDIT: So I see that there is the ability to see this in the IDE - that was not appearing for us straight away this morning but after a restart or two it has started to appear. However, the lack of usage tracking in github.com is still poor, as is the lack of notice for switching this on.

[Akash1134]

Hey @matt-buchanan,

Thanks for bringing this up! Here's what's currently available for monitoring Copilot usage in your Enterprise setup:

1. Basic license reports:

   • Go to profile > Your enterprise > Settings > Billing and licensing
   • You'll see seat counts and spending by organization
   • You can download a CSV report too

   View license usage docs

2. User activity tracking:

   • At the org level: Your organizations > [Org name] > Settings > Copilot > Access
   • Shows when users last used Copilot and lets you download a report

   User activity data docs

3. Metrics API (most detailed option):

   • Provides daily usage stats by language, editor, and feature
   • Enterprise owners need to enable this in policies first
   • Data goes back 28 days

   Copilot Metrics API docs

I hear you on wanting better usage monitoring. While these tools don't give you everything you're looking for, the Metrics API probably gets you closest. I'll pass your feedback to our product team about improving individual usage tracking.

What specific metrics would be most helpful for your team?

Thanks,
Akash

[CameronRedmore]

Well, that's a shame. The unlimited nature of Copilot made it very useful.
300 credits per month, especially with some models using 10 credits per request (eg, you can use Claude 4 Opus 30 times in an entire month and that's your lot) is an unusably low amount.

I've been with Copilot since before it launched, but now, I'm looking for alternatives.

[lucvutuan]

Well, that's a shame. The unlimited nature of Copilot made it very useful. 300 credits per month, especially with some models using 10 credits per request (eg, you can use Claude 4 Opus 30 times in an entire month and that's your lot) is an unusably low amount.

I've been with Copilot since before it launched, but now, I'm looking for alternatives.

i do believe that after this update many people will think of an alternative. Especially when one other coding assistant just update their policy for unlimited for pro plan.

[mm53bar]

Yes - that's the key here. This is fine for chat based LLM usage. But when agents consume so many requests, Copilot burns through premium requests too fast. I don't mind giving Github more money for more access but $20/day is a bit steep. My team is on a Business plan and we have no upgrade path except to go with full Enterprise.

This change is anti-agent which is the opposite of how things are trending right now. Time to look for an alternative.

[povimd9]

Ya, same here.
Caught me off guard when i got blocked, as let be frank, the only relatively decent agent for experienced developers is Claude.
Actively looking for alternatives, which is a real shame - i always appreciated GitHub as my go-to for community oriented projects.
I can only hope this ridiculous limit changes before i find an alternative, anyone up there listening to the community?!

[ux4578]

It seems completely unfair that they would put such severe limitations on us if we were paying for it.
We would get unlimited coding and Q&A for "free" with DeepSeek, and severe limitations on "paid" Github Copilot. This is just ridiculous.

[ux4578]

Google has released Gemini CLI.

It's free for up to 1000 requests per day.

You'll have to say goodbye to GitHub copilot, which only allows 300 requests per month and charges extra.

[sebhofmann]

I can see the the Quota Usage in the IDE. It currently says 1%, but i don not understand why i need to wait 30 Minutes to see how many Request i made this month. It makes it hard to get a feeling what a typical premium Request uses, compared to the monthly included Requests. I would love to have a absolute count in the IDE and also a overview for last hour, today, last week which is in real time.

I also had many Requests aborted, due some errors (mostly with Gemini 2.5 pro, which is the best model in my opinion), do these still count as premium Requests?

[Akash1134]

Hi @sebhofmann I have shared your feedback with the product team and will update you once I have an answer. Thanks!

[denysvitali]

This made my GitHub Copilot subscription completely useless. I'll not renew my subscription and switch to something else.

I'm sorry GitHub - I was a huge fan / promoter of the GitHub Copilot Pro plan and I got you a few customers too. I'll make sure all of them cancel their subscription as it's clearly not worth the money anymore.

[dreamy32]

Of course GPT 4.1 is the included model... You always have to watch it in agent mode, otherwise, it will stop. At least with Claude Sonnet 4, Gemini, etc. they act as TRUE agents that can work autonomously.

I ask him to analyse my project and make detailed documentation, and he provides me a markdown with 40 lines...

Im cancelling my Github Copilot Pro subscription to get Claude Max. 👋

[fsoft72]

There's also a big problem: if a request fails (and they fail often, especially if you are using Google Gemini) it's counted anyway. If you are not able to deliver, it shouldn't be on us.

[sammcj]

And the size (number of tokens) isn't taken into account so tiny requests are billed the same as huge requests - also there's no prompt caching so you're paying full price for all requests.

[gelu22]

I am at the end of a project, what alternative do you recommend? I'm using Claude4 for coding, I can also use Gemini 2.5 Pro

[jWeck-Software]

From my experience, Jetbrains Junie and Claude Code are working great.
I had also tried copilot for VSC and Jetbrains, but it is simply garbage in comparison, not even close.

Others are recommending cursor as a good alternative, but I miss a lot of code features which jetbrains offers in comparison.
You can for example use cursor as ai companion and debug/code with another IDE.

At the moment, I am waiting for a license to test Mistral-Code, to be able to tell which one is best suited for our company.
I hope this helps at least a little. :)

[wrek]

cursor is working pretty damn well.
You've cancelled your subscription to GitHub Copilot Pro. This plan change will take effect on 2025-07-11.

[wrek]

scratch that, cursor also has these stupid premium pricing limits. 500 requests gone in 3 days.

[sammcj]

GPT 4.1 and 4o are really very poor models and basically useless for agentic coding tasks.

For comparison Google's Gemini coding agent now offers 28x-56x Github's Enterprise plan rate limits on their free tier:

[gelu22]

Gemini-CLI is very expensive, it makes no sense for amateur code writing.

[BhortmanGSU]

Having a hard time understanding this. 1000 free requests a day is too expensive?

[gelu22]

I don't know, within 3h I got a bill for almost 80USD.

[BhortmanGSU]

Fascinating. I will have to check it out

[JDUXer]

You get the free request as long as you login (/auth) using your email, not your api key. You can set it up to spend $0 though. Also, this free request ONLY works for the email login I found out.

[gelu22]

When I simply logged in, I almost immediately got a notification that the funds were exhausted; so I connected the API and instantly got a notification that the budget was exhausted (I don't know, maybe an hour had passed), so I closed the billing account at the stage of this 80USD.
I am now trying to reproduce this behavior (not using the API key), we'll see if it happens again

[edit]
At this point I have not been able to reproduce this behavior, I still have access in GoogleCLI using login, without API.
Of course, Google charged me money for using the API.

[wrek]

They signed off the message "WE WANT YOUR FEEDBACK" but they clearly don't give a shit about our feedback.

[gelu22]

I think they are listening - my bill is charged in a completely acceptable way. i am no longer looking for another solution - at least for now.

[wrek]

How did you get satisfaction? It's 10am on the 30th and I'm supposed to get my 300 requests reset today but I'm still waiting... this experience is amatuer-hour and I feel like the people running this show are clueless corporate drones with no idea what AI even is.

[gelu22]

> How did you get satisfaction? It's 10am on the 30th and I'm supposed to get my 300 requests reset today but I'm still waiting... this experience is amatuer-hour and I feel like the people running this show are clueless corporate drones with no idea what AI even is.

Sorry, but I got confused - I was referring to the rate for premium queries in Github Copilot Chat (I have subscriptions for 10USD) and I don't understand 300 queries, as I think it refers to GeminiCLI?

[wrek]

You have 300 requests in github copilot for $10. Every time you touch the interface, talk to the thing, ask a question, answer a question, tell it to keep trying or continue, is a request. See you in a couple days. ;)

[gelu22]

Currently, 19% of premium inquiries within the free limit, and I have auto acceptance enabled and practically from 8 to sometimes even 22 I direct the agent's activities.

[wrek]

I just wasted 12 requests arguing with the damn thing about continuing it's previous task. It wasn't doing anything it just kept telling me "Great idea, I'm on it, I'm working on it or I'm about to do it" over and over and over... until I finally sent "GET TO FUCKING WORK" and it snapped to action. This product IS NOT PRODUCTION READY and we should not be paying this much for it.

[wrek]

This stinks like fraud. I keep getting this error on the only free model GPT 4.1 forcing me to use the paid models:

Sorry, the response was filtered by the Responsible AI Service. Please rephrase your prompt and try again. Learn more.

[jtabox]

You know, we can't have our calculators displaying 666, some people might be offended and even be hurt by seeing this satanic number in front of them. So from now on, if the calculator arrives at a result that contains a visible 666, it will simply stop working and refuse to display the number.
We want our calculators to be Responsible™️, but since they're not able to, we'll just hinder parts of their functionality. Sorry if this means somewhat lower quality of your customer experience, but imagine how truly horrible and devastating it would be if someone was just doing their daily math and entered 333 * 2.

[danielstefanescu]

I run a GitHub Enterprise instance with 10 organizations with Copilot for Business enabled. I cannot find a way to see the premium requests usage for the previous month or other time periods other than the current month.

Is this by design?

It is necessary to estimate the budget based on consumption data from previous months, as establishing a budget arbitrarily would not be appropriate.

[K3UL]

Same boat as you, the API are limited to 28 days by design. We implemented our own batch to save all data every day to keep a longer history

[danielstefanescu]

This is a different topic (CoPilot metrics through API); I'm talking about premium requests usage report which is available only in UI and only for the current month which is totally suboptimal.

[K3UL]

Ah yes these CSV files are a pain in the a**

[wrek]

These people have no idea wtf they're doing other than increasing profits. They're destroying their own profit engine from inside with these shit features and poor analytics. FFS the product ITSELF can do a better job of analytics than the website.

[BhortmanGSU]

VSC must have crashed 15 times today or rolled back and reset my requests. I must have wasted 40 requests today on this. Very irritating.

[BhortmanGSU]

I crashed twice since I posted this, so I guess there goes 10 more!

[wrek]

Yeah I'm crashing constantly now as well. Microsoft is a joke.

[BhortmanGSU]

It crashes in the middle of edits and then rolls back like 20 requests. It is just wasting my subscription

[BhortmanGSU]

When VSC crashes or has an issue it will roll back a significant number of requests. Are these requests being added to my monthly rate?

[afield1235]

This implementation has been a complete miss. Is anyone monitoring this thread? Free Trial was enough to steer me away from ever paying for this in the future.

microsoft/vscode#252230

[knofte]

Actually, I really like it right now. It's working perfectly for all my projects, and the current billing system is spot on. :)

[ssilvius]

I tested the copilot agent on two really simple issues, it burned my entire 1500 requests budget on those two requests. The next day they make each issue one request. I have been without Copilot since and my support tickets go unanswered. I'm not giving them anymore money nor are my orgs. Three weeks of silence is outrageous for pro+ subscriber.