On June 1st, 2026, GitHub moved Copilot's monthly Pro and Pro+ plans from "premium requests" to AI credits. One credit equals ﹩0.01, every request draws from a per-model rate card, and overage costs a flat ﹩0.01 per credit on every plan. As billing models go, this one is defensible. It is more legible than the old system, and the flat overage price is genuinely friendly.
I went through the billing docs and I found five details that most developers will learn the hard way: on an invoice. Here they are, each with the one move that defuses it.
1. Part of your allowance is written in pencil
Pro at ﹩10/mo advertises 1,500 credits. Read closer: that is 1,000 base credits plus 500 "flex" credits. Pro+ at ﹩39 is 3,900 base plus 3,100 flex. Max at ﹩100 is 10,000 plus 10,000. The pattern: base equals plan price times 100, and only the base is contractual. GitHub's docs describe the flex portion as "designed to adapt as the economics of AI evolve," which is a polite way to say it can shrink.
The move: budget against base credits only. If your monthly burn fits inside plan price times 100, no future adjustment of the flex allotment can surprise you.
2. September 1st is a cliff for orgs
Existing Business and Enterprise customers currently run on a promotional allowance: 3,000 credits per user per month on Business (﹩19 per seat), 7,000 on Enterprise (﹩39 per seat). That promo ends on September 1st, 2026. Afterward the numbers drop to the standard 1,900 and 3,900 per seat, pooled at the org level. Same seats, same usage, a larger September bill.
The move: take your org's current monthly credit consumption, subtract the post-promo pool, and price the difference at ﹩0.01 per credit now, in July, while there is still time to argue about it in a planning meeting instead of a finance thread.
3. Code review runs two meters
Copilot code review consumes AI credits, as expected. It also bills GitHub Actions minutes separately. Two line items, one feature, and the second one is easy to miss.
The move: if code review is enabled broadly, check both the credits line and the Actions line on your next invoice before you decide what the feature really costs. For calibration: completions and next edit suggestions remain free and unmetered. The meters only start with Copilot Chat, the CLI, the cloud coding agent, Spaces, Spark, third-party coding agents, and code review.
4. Annual subscribers exit through the basement
If you sit on an annual Pro or Pro+ plan, you keep the old premium-request pricing until your plan expires. Then you land on Copilot Free unless you actively renew onto the credits system. GitHub publishes no formula to convert premium requests into credits, so you cannot compute in advance what your current usage will cost under the new unit. GitHub also rewrites its pricing docs in place, with no official history of past rates. I keep a dated, re-verified copy of the full per-model rate table, plan allowances, and billing mechanics at RoninForge.org/github-ai-credits/ for exactly this reason: when the numbers change, I want a record of what they were.
The move: a month before expiry, log a normal week of usage and price it against the current rate card yourself. Do not assume the tier that "matches" your old plan matches your burn.
5. The upgrade instinct is usually wrong
Credits do not roll over. The meter resets at 00:00 UTC on the 1st of each month. Combine that with the flat ﹩0.01 overage and the arithmetic turns counterintuitive: Pro is the cheapest plan below 4,400 credits per month, Pro+ from 4,400 to 13,100, Max above that.
A concrete case. A daily-driver workload on Pro with Claude Sonnet 4.6, 25 interactions a day, about 12K input tokens with 50% cached plus 1.5K output per interaction, 21 working days: roughly 1,999 credits a month. That is 133% of the Pro allowance and about ﹩4.99 of overage. Pay the five dollars. Pro+ costs ﹩29 more for headroom this workload never touches. I built a small calculator to answer my own version of this question. It runs entirely in the browser at RoninForge.org/copilot-credits-calculator/: pick model and plan, get monthly burn, overage, and break-even. For the workload above it says stay on Pro, which is the answer that convinced me it was honest.
One last lever: auto model selection gives a 10% discount on credit burn on paid plans, and it stacks with the stay-put strategy.
None of this is fraud. It is fine print, and fine print rewards whoever reads it before the invoice arrives.
