Executive Summary:
- Internal documents reveal Microsoft’s planned rollout for token-based billing for all GitHub Copilot customers starting in June.
- Copilot Business Customers will pay $19 per-user-per-month and receive $30 of pooled AI credits.
- Copilot Enterprise customers will pay $39 per-user-per-month and receive $70 of pooled AI credits.
- Sources say that these amounts may change before the launch of token-based billing.
- It is unclear what will happen to individual subscribers.
- The company is expected to make the announcement on 4/23.
Documents viewed by Where’s Your Ed At shed additional light on Microsoft’s transition to token-based billing for GitHub Copilot, as the company grapples with spiraling costs of AI compute.
As reported on Monday (and as announced soon after by Microsoft), the company has taken the step to suspend new sign-ups for individual and student accounts, has removed Anthropic’s Opus models from the cheapest $10-a-month plan, and plans to further tighten usage limits.
According to the documents, the announcement for token-based billing will be tomorrow (4/23), with changes to GitHub Copilot rolling out at the beginning of June.
Explainer: At present, GitHub Copilot users have a certain amount of “requests” — interactions where you ask the model to do something, with Pro ($10-a-month) accounts getting 300 a month, and Pro+ ($39-a-month) getting 1500. More-expensive models use more requests, cheaper ones use less (I’ll explain in a bit).
Moving to “token-based billing” means that instead of using “requests,” GitHub Copilot users will pay for the actual cost of tokens. For example, Claude Opus 4.7 costs $5 per million input tokens (stuff you feed in) and $25 per million output tokens (stuff the model outputs, including tokens for chain-of-thought reasoning.)
Users will pay a monthly subscription to access GitHub Copilot, and receive a certain allotment of AI tokens based on their subscription level. Organizations paying for GitHub Copilot will have “pooled” AI credits, meaning that tokens are shared across the entire organization.
GitHub Copilot Business Customers will pay $19 per-user-per-month and receive $30 of pooled AI credits, and Copilot Enterprise customers will pay $39 per-user-per-month and receive $70 of pooled AI credits.
While the documents refer to moving “all” GitHub Copilot users to token-based billing, it’s unclear at this time how Microsoft will be handling individual Pro or Pro+ subscribers.
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