If you search for "GitHub Copilot budget policy", most posts point you to cost centers: assign a budget to a cost center, map the cost center to a team or business unit, done. Clean story, except for one detail nobody mentions upfront — cost centers require a GitHub Enterprise Cloud account. That's not the same thing as being on the Copilot Enterprise plan; user-level budgets already work fine on Copilot Business. It's about the account type; a standalone Organization account doesn't have cost centers, and neither does GitHub Enterprise Server if you're self-hosted. If you're not on Enterprise Cloud, cost centers are off the table. We ran into exactly this. No Enterprise Cloud account, no cost centers, but still a real need to keep Copilot spend under control across a growing user base. Remark: if you do have GitHub Enterprise Cloud, cost centers are probably still the better fit. This post is for the rest of us. The starting point We have two...