Microsoft's GitHub this week said paying GitHub Copilot customers will now face monthly limits on certain types of high-powered AI requests, and will have to pay more if they want to surpass those limits.
Welcome to the AI industry's latest variation on bill shock, made famous in the telecom industry and later refined for the cloud computing industry.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke announced the changes back in April. After all, someone has to pay for all the expensive AI model training, either directly or through a subscription upgrade undertaken to avoid service interruption.
Customers with Copilot Pro, Pro+, Business, and Enterprise plans can still make unlimited requests at a limited rate to OpenAI's GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o for agent mode, chat interactions, and code completions.
But those seeking to do more complicated tasks with AI now must consider the number of so-called "premium requests" that will be consumed. A request is any interaction with GitHub Copilot: a prompt or a response. A premium request involves features that require more processing power, specifically Copilot Chat, Copilot coding agent, Agent mode in Copilot Chat, Copilot code review, Copilot Extensions, and Copilot Spaces.
How fast you use up your allotment of premium requests will vary based on the underlying AI model's multiplier.
For example, GPT-4.5 has a premium request multiplier of 50x, so using it for Copilot code review would burn through your monthly allotment five times more quickly than using Claude Opus 4 (10x), and 200 times faster than using Google Gemini 2.0 Flash (0.25x).
The monthly allotment of premium requests varies by plan: Pro (300 per month), Pro+ (1,500 per month), Business (300 per user per month), and Enterprise (1,000 per user per month).
Copilot paid users may continue making premium requests beyond their monthly allotments by opting into metered billing, which starts at $0.04 per request.
Predictably, the change has elicited grumbling from the GitHub Copilot users in online forums.
In a GitHub community discussion thread about the new monthly limits, almost all of the more than two dozen comments posted over the past two days argue that the limits are far too low and appear to be designed to force customers to upgrade to more expensive subscription plans.
Other forum threads similarly object to the changes.
The latest change follows GitHub's introduction of a free tier last December that offers 2,000 code completions and 50 premium requests per month. ®
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