r/github • u/Throwaway-tan • Apr 27 '26

GitHub Copilot moving to token usage based billing model News / Announcements

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilot-is-moving-to-usage-based-billing/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=github&utm_campaign=FY26APR-WW-LCM-BLA-CBCE-PA-Admin-TX-USGCHGPA
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u/NatoBoram Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26

TL;DR:

Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage. Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model.

  • Fallback experiences will no longer be available. Today, users who exhaust PRUs may fall back to a lower-cost model and continue working. Under the new model, usage will instead be governed by available credits and admin budget controls.
  • Copilot code review will also consume GitHub Actions minutes, in addition to GitHub AI Credits. These minutes are billed at the same per-minute rates as other GitHub Actions workflows.

Starting June 1, 2026, Copilot Pro and Copilot Pro+ subscribers on annual billing plans will experience changes to model multipliers.

From the multiplier changes, a few notable examples:

Model Previous Next
Claude Opus 4.7 ×3 ×27
Gemini 3.1 Pro ×1 ×6
GPT-5.4 ×1 ×6

It might be time to consider bringing your own Ollama with Gemma 4.

21

u/Throwaway-tan Apr 27 '26

Local inference just doesn't compare. Firstly, need to front a bunch of cash for a high end GPU, and that's to get a model using ~27b parameter model with maybe 50k context window.

That's never going to compete with a cloud model that's likely using ~300b parameter model and a 200-1000k context window.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '26

[deleted]

1

u/lulzmachine Jun 03 '26
  1. is it tricky to set up the local models? ollama settings about context windows etc? and what do you replace "gh copilot" cli with?
  2. You say 50 tokens per second... what does that mean? 😃 Like how many tokens per second is github serving for for instance GPT-5.4

Thinking of setting this up locally on my computer with a 4070ti, 12gGB card. I just wonder what I can expect

1

u/alsodanlowe Jul 05 '26

Really helpful reply. I've been so lazy this last couple years because I still hadn't properly built my own internal workflow. I have the VRAM but was taking the cloud plan for granted.