GitHub Copilot, Microsoft-owned GitHub’s AI coding assistant, could soon become costlier for some users.
On Friday, GitHub announced “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot, a new system that imposes rate limits when users switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as “agentic” coding and multi-file edits. While GitHub Copilot subscribers can still take unlimited actions with the base model (OpenAI’s GPT-4o), tasks and actions with newer models, like Anthropic’s 3.7 Sonnet, will now be capped.
Customers on the Copilot Pro ($20 per month) tier will receive 300 monthly premium requests beginning on May 5, GitHub said in a blog post. As for Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users, they’ll receive 300 and 1,000 monthly premium requests, respectively, starting between May 12 and May 19.
Customers on any of those plans can purchase additional premium requests at $0.04 per request, or upgrade to GitHub’s new Copilot Pro+ plan. Starting at $39 per month, Copilot Pro+ offers 1,500 premium requests and “access to the best models,” GitHub says, including OpenAI’s GPT-4.5.
The effective price hike for Copilot’s more capable models, which comes a day after AI coding platform Devin increased rates for some users, is perhaps a reflection of the higher computing costs these models incur. Reasoning models like 3.7 Sonnet take more time to fact-check their answers, making them more reliable — but also increasing the computing needed to run them.
Yet Copilot isn’t unprofitable. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last August said that Copilot accounted for over 40% of GitHub’s revenue growth in 2024, and is already a larger business than all of GitHub when the tech giant acquired it roughly seven years ago.
