GitHub Copilot: New Pricing and Restrictions Revealed

GitHub Copilot: Pricing Revisions and Restrictions for Individual Users

On the very day the controversy surrounding Claude Code and its temporary $100/month pricing erupted, GitHub unveiled major changes regarding GitHub Copilot's pricing. Unlike Anthropic, GitHub officially communicated these adjustments, which include several notable modifications.

Among these changes, there is a tightening of usage limits, a suspension of sign-ups for individual plans, and a restriction of access to Claude Opus 4.7 to the Pro+ plan, which now costs $39/month. Additionally, previous Opus models have been completely phased out.

Adapting to New Demands

The so-called agentic workflows have profoundly transformed Copilot's computational needs. Long and parallel sessions now consume significantly more resources than the initial pricing structure could support. With the rapid evolution of Copilot's agentic capabilities, agents are performing more tasks, increasingly pushing customers to hit the usage limits put in place to ensure service reliability.

Just six months ago, heavy users of LLM consumed far fewer tokens. Today, coding agents require substantial computational resources. Copilot distinguished itself by charging per request rather than per token, meaning that unique agentic requests consuming more tokens directly impact their margins. The new pricing model introduces usage limits based on tokens, both per session and on a weekly basis.

Ambiguity Regarding the Product in Question

A problematic point in this announcement is the lack of clarity regarding which "GitHub Copilot" product is affected by these changes. Last month, an article titled "How Many Microsoft Products Are Named 'Copilot'?" mapped out every product identified by Tey Bannerman. It listed 75 products sharing the Copilot brand, of which 15 include "GitHub Copilot" in their name.

According to the GitHub Copilot plans page, this includes Copilot CLI, the Copilot cloud agent, and code review (features on GitHub.com), as well as Copilot IDE features available in VS Code, Zed, JetBrains, and other platforms.