GitHub has announced that it will be shifting to a usage-based billing model for its GitHub Copilot AI service starting on June 1. The move is pitched as a way to “better align pricing with actual usage” and a necessary step to keep Copilot financially sustainable amid surging demand for limited AI computing resources.

GitHub Copilot subscribers currently receive an allocation of monthly “requests” and “premium requests,” which are spent whenever they ask Copilot for help from an AI model. But those broad categories cover many different AI tasks with a wide range of total backend computing costs, GitHub says.

“Today, a quick chat question and a multi-hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount,” the Microsoft-owned company wrote in its announcement. And while GitHub says it has “absorbed much of the escalating inference cost behind that usage” to this point, lumping all “premium requests” together “is no longer sustainable.”

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Last week, AI critic Ed Zitron cited “leaked internal documents” in reporting on the upcoming usage-based billing changes. Those documents reportedly indicate that the week-over-week costs for GitHub Copilot had nearly doubled since January. That timing aligns with the rise of agentic AI assistants like Openclaw, which can consume massive amounts of AI tokens through their nearly always-on multi-agent workflows.

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