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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

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