GitHub Copilot costs more or runs out of credits

What’s going on

On 1 June 2026, Copilot's flat premium-request allowances gave way to usage-based AI Credits — Pro is $10 for 1,000 credits — and roughly 4.7 million subscribers were migrated at once. The consequential detail is that the old fallback model was removed: once your credits are gone, there's no free base model to drop to, you simply stop. Agentic sessions empty the meter fastest — a single agent run can consume on the order of 30–40 credits, and power users reported monthly bills jumping ten- to fifty-fold, one climbing from about $29 to roughly $750 as autonomous workflows churned through credits. An unchanged workflow that suddenly hits a credit wall is the metering switch showing, compounded by two earlier moves: April 2026 pulled Opus models out of Pro (they're Pro+ only now), and December 2025 removed the $0 default budget that used to block overage. The premium-requests analytics dashboard is where the cost lives — generally available since September 2025 and now reporting AI credits consumed per user — and agent runs will dominate the list. So keep routine completions and simple chat on the cheaper included model, reserve premium models like Opus (via Pro+ at $39 for about 7,000 credits) for genuinely hard problems, and cap agent spend at the source: since July 2026 you can set AI-credit session limits in the Copilot CLI and SDK so one agent can't run away with your balance. Usage-based billing punishes surprises, so a weekly look at the meter beats waiting for renewal — the sooner you catch a spike, the cheaper the correction.

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