GitHub Copilot: New customers locked out, usage more severely limited

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Microsoft has paused registration for GitHub Copilot. New customers can therefore no longer sign up for the Pro, Pro+ and Student plans. At the same time, the US company tightened token limits and announced the removal of Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.6 from the Pro+ plan. Opus 4.7 will remain available in the Pro+ plan. All Opus models were immediately removed from the Pro plan. The free tier and enterprise subscriptions are not currently affected by the changes.

Registration freeze to ensure service quality

The reason for the changes is an unexpectedly high demand for computing power. “Long-running, parallelized sessions regularly consume far more resources than planned. The original structures were not designed for this,” writes Joe Binder, VP of Product, on the GitHub blog. Meanwhile, AI agents are taking over more tasks and customers are reaching their usage limits. Without restrictions, service quality for existing customers would deteriorate.

The usage limits of the Pro+ subscription are more than five times higher than in the Pro plan. This limit is independent of the number of premium requests. Instead, it is a token-based restriction within a defined time window. Thus, customers may still have unused premium requests but have already reached the usage limits.

Tokens and models determine usage limits

Microsoft distinguishes between two time windows for GitHub Copilot's usage limits, which are based on token consumption and a multiplier that is higher for computationally intensive models. The first time window refers to the respective session. If customers exhaust their limit, they must wait for the usage window to reset before they can use Copilot again.

The second time window is the weekly limit, which represents an upper limit for usable tokens. Microsoft aims to restrict parallelized requests, which often run for a long time and incur high costs. In the future, the company intends to adjust the limits to achieve a balance between reliability and demand, writes Binder. Customers can view their current consumption in Visual Studio Code or GitHub Copilot's command-line tool.

Microsoft advises economical use or more expensive plan

Microsoft recommends that customers approaching their usage limit switch to smaller models, use fewer parallel workflows, or utilize the plan mode. Alternatively, the company refers its Pro customers to the Pro+ plan.

GitHub Copilot costs 10 US dollars per month in the Pro plan, Pro+ users pay 39 US dollars. Customers of the Pro and Pro+ plans can cancel their subscription at any time and have their April fees refunded via a support request until May 20, 2026. Most recently, Microsoft tried to earn money with GitHub Copilot not only through subscription fees, but also by displaying ads in pull requests. After user complaints, the company backed down.

(sfe)