GitHub has announced new changes to its AI Copilot service in a move that looks to drive profitability – but it’s sparked ire among developers.
As part of a shake up of the service, the company will begin enforcing monthly limits on the most powerful AI coding models.
This policy change will affect a range of top industry models, including Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet ranges, as well as Gemini 2.0 Flash and OpenAI’s o3-mini.
“Monthly premium request allowances for paid GitHub Copilot users are now in effect,” the company said in a blog post confirming the move.
Billing for additional requests will start at $0.04, GitHub confirmed. What this means is that users who now exceed monthly allowances on these models will be forced to wait until their next billing period, or agree to pay on a request-by-request basis.
How the GitHub Copilot pricing changes work
A ‘request’ essentially equates to every interaction with the Copilot tool, according to GitHub. This applies not only to generating code, but also natural language queries.
“Each time you send a prompt in a chat window or trigger a response from Copilot, you’re making a request,” the company explained in documentation.
‘Premium requests’, meanwhile, refer to more advanced processing power required by Copilot. Consumption rates on these particular requests vary wildly, and are often dependent on the AI model and features being used.
Copilot Chat, Agent Mode in Copilot Chat, Copilot Spaces, and Copilot coding agent all require premium requests.
Multipliers are also a major consideration here, with each model consuming premium requests based on respective compute power. For example, Gemini 2.0 Flash uses a 0.25x multiplier, while GPT-4.5 has a 50x multiplier.
This means a single interaction with the latter essentially counts as 50 premium requests.
As it stands, users on the GitHub Copilot Pro plan are entitled to 300 premium requests per month alongside an unlimited number of real-time code suggestions with what the company describes as “included models” such as GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o.
Copilot Business business users are also entitled to 300 premium requests while GitHub Copilot Enterprise users get 1,000 requests.
Developers aren’t happy about the price changes
This is by no means an out-of-the-blue announcement for GitHub customers. Earlier this year, the company first announced plans to implement a new premium request pricing system before temporarily delaying plans.
In a blog post at the time, CEO Thomas Dohmke outlined the proposed changes while confirming plans to launch a new Pro+ plan. This allows users to access 1,500 monthly premium requests for $39 per month.
There have been mixed reactions to the pricing changes among developers, at least if community comments are anything to go by. One user in particular noted that the premium request levels for the Pro plan fall short.
“300 premium requests are not enough for pro plan,” they wrote. “300 per day is ok, per month is ridiculous,” another added.
Another user hit out at the price changes, noting that instead of bolstering the options in the Pro+ plan, GitHub has “simply made the Pro plan worse”.
“This change doesn’t enhance the value of higher tiers,” they added. “It just limits existing functionality for paying users who expected more consistency in what they’re paying for.”
“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.”
The user added that they’re considering switching to alternative services, such as Cursor, once their annual subscription ends.
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