build with ai is costly changelog
Changes and updates to building with ai is costly
April 27, 2026
i refunded my copilot subscription
When I woke up today, I was given a surprise in my email, which culminated in three things.
- The immediate derailment of the rest of my day
- A Twitter post (I refuse to call it X)
- The attempted “refund” of my Copilot subscription
on 1
I got the following verbatim email from Copilot-Microsoft-GitHub-Whatever,
Subject:
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing and retiring annual plans
Body:
Hi there,
You’re receiving this because you have an annual Copilot Pro or Pro+ plan.
GitHub Copilot isn’t the same product it was a year ago. It has evolved from an in-editor assistant into an agentic platform capable of running long, multi-step coding sessions, using the latest models, and iterating across entire repositories. Agentic usage is becoming the default, and it brings significantly higher compute and inference demands.
To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we’re transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare. If you’re also an admin on a Copilot Business or Enterprise plan, you’ll receive a separate email covering what’s changing for your organization.
Last week, we made temporary updates to Copilot individual plans to improve reliability and performance ahead of the broader move to usage-based billing. We will loosen usage limits once usage-based billing is in effect.
What’s changing on June 1 for Copilot Billing
- Premium request units, or PRUs, will be replaced by GitHub AI Credits which are a monthly allotment of credits consumed based on token consumption (input, output, and cached tokens) according to the listed API rates per model. This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users.
- Copilot code review’s agentic architecture runs on GitHub Actions. Copilot code review will now 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.
- Fallback experiences will no longer be available. Under the new model, usage will instead be governed by available credits.
What’s changing on June 1 for Copilot Annual Plans
- GitHub is retiring Copilot annual plans. As a current annual subscriber your Copilot Pro or Pro+ plan will continue as-is with premium request-based pricing. When your annual plan ends, your account will automatically transition to Copilot Free, which you can continue using at no cost.
- The experience on annual plans will change significantly: model multipliers will increase, and standard-tier models (currently 0x) will no longer be available, reflecting increased compute costs and the transition to usage-based billing, and no new models or features will be added to annual plans going forward.
To keep getting new models and features, we recommend switching to a Copilot Pro or Pro+ monthly plan with the new usage-based billing system starting June 1. If you switch before your annual subscription expires, you’ll receive prorated credits for the remaining value of your annual plan.
If you switch to a monthly plan, Copilot Pro is $10/month and Pro+ is $39/month, and each includes $10 and $39 in monthly AI Credits, respectively.
You can find more details on usage-based billing in our blog post and FAQ. We appreciate your patience as we build a more sustainable Copilot for everyone.
The GitHub Team
On 2:
@Microsoft’s latest decision with @Copilot is another example of remediating poor product decision making by pivoting at the customer’s expense. Maybe don’t offer annual plans if you can’t deliver? pic.twitter.com/KJGxMtwxQt
— a h (@x97115104) April 27, 2026
Followed by:
The AI industry as it currently stands with pervasive rate limiting, poor data quality, and a voracious, almost insatiable, need for compute through the scaling hypothesis is unsustainable and conclusively a bubble. I say it has ~2 years before burst unless something changes.
— a h (@x97115104) April 27, 2026
on 3:
Since I had to write this myself and I’m tired, I’ll consider that enough said.
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As always, 'twas nice to write for you, dear reader. Until next time.