Skip to main content

Avoiding unexpected costs from GitHub Copilot premium requests

Starting from last week June 18, 2025 an important change was activated in GitHub Copilot. From that day on you need to pay extra for any premium requests that exceed your monthly allowance. This means that we should start considering more how we use Copilot and be aware of the (potential) costs.

What are premium requests?

Premium requests are requests that use more advanced processing power and apply to any request that is not using the default models (GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 at the moment of writing this post).

The number of premium requests you get out-of-the-box is different depending on the plan you are using:

Important! Be also aware that a multiplier is applied to the cost depending on the model used. For some models (e.g. GPT-4.5) this can add up quickly as the multiplier can be as high as 50!

 

Disabling premium requests

If you want to avoid unexpected costs, you can disable premium requests so that they don’t exceed your monthly allowance of premium requests.

  • Go to the settings for your GitHub organization:

https://github.com/organizations/<yourorgname>/settings/

  • Click on Copilot – > Policies:

 

  • In the billing section at the top, set Additional Copilot premium requests to Disabled:

 

More information

Understanding and managing requests in Copilot - GitHub Docs

Plans for GitHub Copilot - GitHub Docs

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more