Some important changes are happening, which means you will need to start paying for the amount of Generative AI you use with GitHub Copilot. This will finally make the end-user think about the monetary cost of executing a request with a Large Language Model, so they realize this stuff is not running for free. In that sense we have been spoiled, so it is time to take up some ownership here for the end-users. This post will give you an overview of what you need to expect and how you can protect yourself from overspending.

What is Premium Requests for GitHub Copilot ?

Tomorrow the 18th is the date GitHub Copilot Premium Requests will be enforced (see the docs here).

This post gives you an overview to know what you need to expect. Copilot Premium Requests are any request that is made to any model that is not the default (currently GPT-4o and GPT-4.1). Some features against a model will cost 1 Premium Request, some will cost more then 1 Premium Request (using GPT-4.5 will be x50!) and some are less expensive (Gemini 2.0 Flash is the cheapest at 0.25x).

I previously recorded a video on Premium Requests as well, find it here if you prefer to learn things that way:

What is a premium request

Here is an overview of the main features that will consume a premium request:

• Chatting with a non default model: 1 premium request per ‘turn’ (every question and answer is a turn)
• Every step in the Coding Agent: 1 premium request. The agent can decide to make multiple steps, and will thus consume a premium request for each step. Note: I hope that the agent will also come with a “max requests” setting, so that you can limit the amount of requests it can make in a single conversation and prevent it from overspending.
• Requesting a Code Review in a Pull Request: 1 premium request
• Agent Mode in an editor: 1 premium request per user initiated request
• Copilot Coding Agent: can use multiple premium requests where it sees fit
• From the docs here, Copilot Spaces and Extensions also consume premium requests, but it is not clear how many requests they consume or for what. I can imagine that a Chat Turn against a Copilot Space will consume a premium request each time, and same for Copilot Extensions. For the latter it is also not clear if that is for both local extensions (like the @Azure extension that runs locally inside of VS Code), or also for the remote extensions that are installed as GitHub Apps in your organization.

Free plan

If you are on a Free plan, even the base model will consume a premium request if you are using the Chat feature.

Paid plans

If you are on a paid plan, then you will get a certain amount of premium requests per month. If you go over this amount, you will be charged for the extra requests at $0.04 per premium request. If that request is against a 50x model, then you will be charged $2.00 for that single request! To view the full overview of the different multipliers, see the documentation.

This is the table of the different amount of included premium requests per plan:

Plan	Premium requests	Copilot Chat in IDEs	Code completion
Copilot Free	50 per month	50 messages per month	2000 completions per month
Copilot Pro	300 per month	Unlimited with base model	Unlimited
Copilot Pro+	1500 per month	Unlimited with base model	Unlimited
Copilot Business	300 per user per month	Unlimited with base model	Unlimited
Copilot Enterprise	1000 per user per month	Unlimited with base model	Unlimited

To protect yourself or your users, you can configure a budget for premium requests in your user/organization settings. The default is $0.00, but you can set it to any amount you want. If you reach this budget, then all premium requests will be blocked until the next month.

This is now finally available inside of the new Coding Agent session panel as well:

Finding your own usage info as a User

The changes that where made where showing the multipliers to the different models to the users so they can make decisions on which model to use:

This is now visible for at least Visual Studio Code, Jetbrains IDE’s, and Visual Studio. These editors also show the setup for your account:

If you look closely, you can even see the progress bar in the middle of the screen showing that I have been using some Premium Requests already. Visual Studio shows it in a slightly different way by using the GitHub Copilot icon in the top right corner:

To find your own usage information, you can go to your User –> Settings –> Billing and then get an overview like this:

Analyzing the GitHub Copilot Premium Requests report in your organization / enterprise

Do you need to analyze the GitHub Copilot Premium requests CSV now that they will be enforced? I created a single page application (SPA) with GitHub Spark and GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to display an overview of the Premium Requests CSV that you can currently download (no API yet 😓).

• Can be hosted on GitHub Pages: GitHub Copilot Premium Requests Usage Analyzer
• Upload the CSV from the enterprise export (Billing and Licenses –> Usage –> Export dropdown right top) Result can be seen here:

See the repo in action here (click on the link on the right side to use your own data): https://github.com/devops-actions/github-copilot-premium-reqs-usage. It’s open source, so feel free to contribute or request features!