Last month, I blogged about the June 1st change coming to GitHub Copilot billing. It appears that the changes started effective at 00:00 UTC, which was about 6.5 hours ago as of the time of the writing of this blog post. I'm sure many things will change in the next 24-48 hours, but I wanted to share my initial experiences, as well as share some overall important notes at this time.
Community Reaction
The changes were effective only a few hours ago, but we are seeing a plethora of comments and feedback being shared within the various GitHub channels either as comments on existing posts or new discussions. Including: 1,800 credits for a single request or one question = 1/3 monthly allocations, and New Token System is Trash, just to name a few.
This is to be expected a bit, as we have discussed previously, we had no real gauge to understand what the impacts and costs were of our prior usage. As the April 2026 data that we received wasn't all that helpful aside from telling about the total cost, individual interactions or processes just couldn't be seen.
My Initial Feedback to GitHub
Any thoughts of going back to the "old way" are most likely just not going to be possible, so I'm trying to take a slightly different approach and work to address the gaps that impact my ability to work within the confines of this new structure. To this point, I've logged two new discussions on the topic:
Copilot Sessions Need Usage/Metrics Display - This is a fundamental bit of feedback that I've had for a while. We NEED to be able to get the information to know how/where we are spending our money, and it needs to be quick & easy for us to see it!
Copilot Sessions Need Per-Interaction Budgets - This is another item, in my opinion, that is fundamental. When I send something over to AI I want to say "don't spend more than ___" on this task. This helps control budgets, set expectations, and help with learning and other actions.
Metered Usage Reporting Doesn't Contain Repository - This is my third feedback item when trying to drill into how I've already used 300 AI credits in < 1 hour today!
If you agree with any of the above, I encourage you to comment, like, and share these items as I think they are easy and actionable items that could make things better!
What Can You Do?
With these changes, one of the biggest questions that I get when consulting with development teams through my company IowaComputerGurus is: "What should we do to avoid huge overruns?"
At this point, I think it's a bit crazy as a whole, but here are a few of the things that we are doing in the interim.
- Disable anything that is automatically incurring AI Costs. - For example, disable the feature to "auto request AI Code Review," and add/request as-needed
- Consider setting per-user, or other level limits, even if lower for the time being, just to get a handle on what is going on.
- Get with your teams and talk about how they are using AI, how they request things, and the importance of proper context.
- Monitor your Billing Usage via "Billing & Licensing" -> "Usage" -> "Metered Usage". This seems to update pretty quickly (within 1-2 minutes), so you can at least try to follow along until we get more details available from GitHub.
- Review with your teams the Model(s) in use and when they are being used
At this point, one of the biggest cost items that I'm seeing is with Code reviews. I tried a single review of a small 3 file change (15 net line differences), and that was more than 48 credits of usage for a single PR review, so it may be worth considering exactly how you handle those reviews if using Copilot, as we don't have a lot of control over the context/scope of those reviews.
I don't typically make these posts about my consulting services, but please do reach out to us at IowaComputerGurus if you are struggling with budget management, cost configuration, or interpreting the billing.
Please! Be Respectful, Be Civil Within the Community!
In reviewing/monitoring the feedback and comments, I do strongly encourage everyone to remember to think before you post. Yes, these changes are horrible. Yes, I hope we will see major changes from GitHub soon. Yes, there are many feature gaps and other reasons to consider other things. But even in the last 6 hours there have been a number of pointed, non-friendly, non-professional posts. The individual GitHub employees shouldn't be attacked.
I strongly encourage us to try and focus in on actionable changes, things that would make the transition more acceptable for everyone, and keep things professional.
What's Been Your Experience?
I'd love to see what you are experiencing, even if it is very new and raw feedback.