Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans

Simon Willison's Blog / 4/22/2026

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Key Points

  • GitHub announced changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plan pricing and limits, citing higher compute demand from expanding agentic workflows.
  • The update tightens usage limits, pauses new signups for the Individual plan, and restricts Claude Opus 4.7 to the higher-priced Pro+ tier.
  • GitHub also dropped the previously available Opus models entirely, shifting users toward newer/higher-tier offerings.
  • The company explains that long-running, parallelized sessions now consume far more resources than earlier plan structures were designed to handle.
  • The new approach moves toward token-based usage limits per session and per week, replacing the earlier per-request-style billing that could harm margins for heavy agentic requests.
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22nd April 2026 - Link Blog

Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans (via) On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing.

Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their changes, which include tightening usage limits, pausing signups for individual plans (!), restricting Claude Opus 4.7 to the more expensive $39/month "Pro+" plan, and dropping the previous Opus models entirely.

The key paragraph:

Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support. As Copilot’s agentic capabilities have expanded rapidly, agents are doing more work, and more customers are hitting usage limits designed to maintain service reliability.

It's easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM users were burning an order of magnitude less tokens. Coding agents consume a lot of compute.

Copilot was also unique (I believe) among agents in charging per-request, not per-token. (Correction: Windsurf also operated a credit system like this which they abandoned last month.) This means that single agentic requests which burn more tokens cut directly into their margins. The most recent pricing scheme addresses that with token-based usage limits on a per-session and weekly basis.

My one problem with this announcement is that it doesn't clearly clarify which product called "GitHub Copilot" is affected by these changes. Last month in How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'? I mapped every one Tey Bannerman identified 75 products that share the Copilot brand, 15 of which have "GitHub Copilot" in the title.

Judging by the linked GitHub Copilot plans page this covers Copilot CLI, Copilot cloud agent and code review (features on GitHub.com itself), and the Copilot IDE features available in VS Code, Zed, JetBrains and more.

Posted 22nd April 2026 at 3:30 am

This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 22nd April 2026.

github 186 microsoft 127 ai 1976 generative-ai 1752 github-copilot 16 llms 1719 llm-pricing 70 coding-agents 194

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