The cost of using GitHub Copilot, the AI-powered coding assistant owned by Microsoft’s GitHub, may be increasing for certain users.

GitHub made an announcement on Friday regarding the introduction of “premium requests” for GitHub Copilot. This new system will impose rate limits on users who switch to AI models other than the base model for tasks such as “agentic” coding and multi-file edits. Although subscribers to GitHub Copilot can still perform unlimited actions with the base model (OpenAI’s GPT-4o), tasks and actions using newer models, such as Anthropic’s 3.7 Sonnet, will be subject to caps.

As stated in a blog post by GitHub, customers on the Copilot Pro plan ($20 per month) will be allocated 300 monthly premium requests starting May 5. Meanwhile, Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users will receive 300 and 1,000 monthly premium requests, respectively, with the rollout scheduled between May 12 and May 19.

Customers on any of these plans have the option to purchase additional premium requests at a cost of $0.04 per request or upgrade to the new Copilot Pro+ plan, which starts at $39 per month. The Copilot Pro+ plan offers 1,500 premium requests and “access to the best models,” according to GitHub, including OpenAI’s GPT-4.5.

This price increase for Copilot’s more advanced models, announced a day after AI coding platform Devin raised rates for some users, may be attributed to the higher computational costs associated with these models. Models like 3.7 Sonnet, which take more time to fact-check their answers and thus become more reliable, require increased computing power to operate.

However, it’s worth noting that Copilot is not operating at a loss. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated last August that Copilot accounted for over 40% of GitHub’s revenue growth in 2024 and has already become a larger business than GitHub as a whole when Microsoft acquired it roughly seven years ago.