"GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing", (github.blog)

[Formtrix]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Copilot in GitHub

Body

This is a comment on a recent article from Mario Rodriguez in github.blog Link.

I want to push back on one specific framing in the announcement, because it doesn’t match how Copilot actually worked for heavy users.

The blog says:

“Today, a quick chat question and a multi‑hour autonomous coding session can cost the user the same amount.”

While that’s technically true under PRUs, it’s not the real/whole story.
Under the PRU system, heavy usage wasn’t “free” - it was recognized by how quickly you burned through your premium requests. The model scaled naturally with coding habits because the rate of PRU consumption tracked the intensity of your work. A long coding session didn't JUST cost less; it cost more in PRUs instead of tokens.

The issue wasn’t that users were getting multi‑hour sessions for the price of a chat. The issue was that PRUs were tied to request count instead of the underlying compute cost of modern agentic workflows. That’s a technical limitation of the unit, not a fairness problem with user behavior.

The new token‑based model is probably more accurate from a compute‑billing perspective, but the messaging makes it sound like users were exploiting a loophole. Most of us were just coding, coding requires multi-iteration steps which aligns well with how the agents solve problem; their output are not always correct at first shot — and this is why the old system was predictable in a way developers value, including myself.

I hope the team designing this pricing model includes people who do heavy, real‑world programming work, because the shift from “predictable request units” to “opaque token burn” is a big change in how we plan and budget our workflow. Couldn't get anything done under the new price logic without being largely in debt to billing, please fix.

-- Keny

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