GitHub Copilot Token Billing Blindsides Developers
17 posts across 7 communities in the last 30 days; 53% from GitHub.
“I hate copilot. Full stop. It sucks, the boomers and newer hires treat it like god, and it’s often wrong. BUT After years of being told “It’s in a Sharepoint folder” and spending what feels like hours looking for a specific document that nobody can f**king email to you because…”
“Copilot has a contract you can enter that says that all use of Copilot is private within that tenant. The issue is that "all use" maybe wasn't including everything you could use Copilot for. But I'm not in that part of the company, so that's only hearsay.”
“If you use GitHub Copilot Agent, you've seen it burn tokens wandering your workspace trying to work out which files matter before it writes a single useful line. Copilot Bill Saver (VS Code extension, I'm the author) It front-loads the part Copilot is worst at: knowing where to…”
Developers are experiencing frustration and disruption due to unexpected changes and limitations in GitHub Copilot, specifically concerning rate limits, token consumption, and unwanted promotional content. This is impacting their productivity, workflows, and increasing costs, while also diminishing their sense of control over their development environment. Engineering leaders are now grappling with how to adapt and manage these tools effectively.
SOURCES (60)
“I downloaded the copilot plugin and it is great, but I want to use a self-hosted LLM and I sadly discovered that this feature is pais-only (and it costs $350)so that's not an option for me. Is there any other plugin for local AI agents…”
“Type: <b Performance Issue</b Selecting any model on the github copilot chat and asking any question, it doesn't work. It says "Reasoning"/"Analysing" for minutes until it excess the limit and I get regected VS Code version: Code 1.141.1 (Universal) (7baac39ec3ca969dab74ac12c097f6a486e46593, 2026 10 12T12:00:06 07:00) OS version: Darwin arm64 24.6.0 Modes: <details <summary Workspace Info</summary </details <details <summary Extensions (13)</summary Name|Identifier|Author|Version | | | GitLens —”
“Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I noticed in a recent commit ( chore: stop advertising Aider and GitHub Copilot... ) that official support and advertising for GitHub Copilot was dropped. I completely understand the reasoning: AI Maestro is designed for fully autonomous, terminal based agents (like Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, or Grok Build) that can act as independent "employees" communicating via AMP, rather than IDE bound chat assistants. However, a huge portion”
“Maybe i am not fully understanding copilot yet, but it seems like Claude 2 years ago. I have previously had Claude draft full forecasts and then verify. Copilot doesn't seem up to it so far. Like I think the little button in word and excel would be my friend, but Copilot doesn't seem to understand that actuals can change between preliminary and final [re: Copilot as a PM]”
“It can but not free; free shouldn't even be called Copilot, the experience is so different. My advice for now is to use the Copilot chat inside the web version of whatever you're working on, not the desktop app version - especially Powerpoint, but don't expect miracles there even if you get a paid licence. Yes the web apps suck, but working through the web interface is cleaner & quicker with Copilot than using Copilot in the native apps. [re: Copilot as a PM]”
“As long as it's the licenced (Premium) version of Copilot and your org has set stuff up properly behind the scenes for Work IQ and grounding responses in work data where appropriate, you'll be fine. If it's Copilot Free, you're @#%@ed. [re: Copilot as a PM]”
“Maybe let it try some text-based chart tool like https://mermaid.js.org/ to generate charts.”
“The licensing side is well covered above, so here's the part that tends to bite after rollout: oversharing, and how agents can make it worse. Copilot itself. It only returns what the user can already access, which sounds safe until you look at what users can already access. Before broad rollout: - Run the oversharing reports in SharePoint Advanced Management (data access governance: sites shared with "Everyone except external users", anyone links, sites with lots of unique permissi”
“Type: <b Bug</b Hi, can you please help me fix my github copilot? I haven't used co pilot until now. I tried to use it today however, it just won't answer back. It's almost frozen and it keeps showing me the "Working..." text. VS Code version: Code 1.104.2 (Universal) (e3a5acfb517a443235981655413d566533107e92, 2025 09 24T11:21:37.073Z) OS version: Darwin arm64 27.0.0 Modes: <details <summary System Info</summary |Item|Value| | | | |CPUs|Apple M3 Pro (12 x 2400)| |GPU Status|2d canvas: enabled<br”
“Please add current month AI Credit (AIC) usage to the GitHub Copilot App. VS Code already exposes this by hovering over the Copilot icon, but the Copilot App currently only shows the plan and whether a usage limit exists. I would like to see the actual AIC consumed during the current billing period, ideally directly in Accounts → Usage and plan, with optional remaining balance and model breakdown. | Field | Value | | | | | App version | 1.1.26 | | OS | Windows 10.0.26300 | | Theme | GitHub | | P”
“I’ve been looking at Microsoft Copilot and I’m curious what people who actually use it think. A few limitations I’ve noticed: Limited connector availability compared with some other AI platforms Limited model flexibility not being able to freely choose/switch between different models in the main Copilot experience AI assistant/agent capabilities feels less flexible for building agents that can actually perform multi-step tasks on your behalf Cost seems relatively expensive compared with some alt”
“I’ve been looking at Microsoft Copilot and I’m curious what people who actually use it think. A few limitations I’ve noticed: Limited connector availability compared with some other AI platforms Limited model flexibility not being able to freely choose/switch between different models in the main Copilot experience AI assistant/agent capabilities feels less flexible for building agents that can actually perform multi-step tasks on your behalf Cost seems relatively expensive compared with some alt”
“[GitHub] ★ 1/5 (v1.278.0) — Copilot remote control could be so useful. But it’s so bad. It stalls a lot. The updates refresh the chat every single time. It needs a good pass from Someone who uses it daily”
“Github Copilot Desktop is too broken for production use. I can't see the contents of PRs and I can't create remote agents in github. This is simply one big disappointment. | Field | Value | | | | | App version | 1.1.23 | | OS | Windows 10.0.26200 | | Theme | Fox | | Path | / | | Tenure | Day 1 |”
“Type: <b Bug</b I have upgraded to 1.139.0 from 1.138.0 and now my copilot has problems where it keeps asking for me to sign in. This is wide spread issue for our whole team. We sign into https://xxxx.ghe.com/ as we use github enterprise. VS Code version: Code 1.139.0 (2242ebbb54efeeb0129e08e919e7e8d43033cd83, 2026 09 22T15:13:34Z) OS version: Windows NT x64 10.0.26200 Modes: <details <summary System Info</summary |Item|Value| | | | |CPUs|AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 w/ Radeon 890M (24 x 1996)| |GPU St”
“Type: <b Performance Issue</b Github copilot is not working in the VS code. I am trying to fix it since 3 4 months but I am not able to solve it.... plz help me out.. Thanks for considering my issue. Extension version: 0.30.3 VS Code version: Code 1.103.1 (Universal) (360a4e4fd251bfce169a4ddf857c7d25d1ad40da, 2025 08 12T16:25:40.542Z) OS version: Darwin arm64 24.6.0 Modes: <details <summary System Info</summary |Item|Value| | | | |CPUs|Apple M4 (10 x 2400)| |GPU Status|2d canvas: enabled<br dire”
“Feature Category Repository Enhancement Learning Objective Create a module page detailing github copilot Feature Summary Create a module page detailing github copilot Current State Content is missing entirely. Proposed Solution Create new elearning documentation. Learner Benefit No response Acceptance Criteria [x] Content created [ ] Documentation updated [ ] Lab validated [ ] Screenshots added [ ] Accessibility review completed Priority High Estimated Effort Medium References No response Confir”
“Feature request: please show GitHub cloud agent sessions in the Copilot macOS app, not just local app sessions. Right now there’s a split between sessions visible in the macOS app and sessions visible on GitHub.com, which makes it harder to track work across environments. I’d like a unified session history in the macOS app that includes cloud agent runs, with links to logs, repo, branch/PR, and status. Even read only visibility would help a lot. Bonus if the app could support search/filtering ac”
“Product is writing the features and then Dev Lead generates the first draft of user stories using GitHub Copilot because it has access to the code repository it can generate detailed and context aware ACs. Product will refine, adjust scope, and sequence the work.”
“I hate copilot. Full stop. It sucks, the boomers and newer hires treat it like god, and it’s often wrong. BUT After years of being told “It’s in a Sharepoint folder” and spending what feels like hours looking for a specific document that nobody can f**king email to you because “It’s in Sharepoint”… Copilot has solved that problem. I open the Sharepoint AI, type in all the words of the thing I’m looking for, and then let it pull up the document I need in literal seconds. This is just to say, if A”
“Problem : GitHub Voice Mode is always listening and will try to act on conversations I am having with others. This means I have to mute/unmute it quite often. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this: no keyboard shortcut to mute and unmute, and while I can mute it with a voice command, there is no way to unmute it. Proposed solutions There are several changes that could be made to improve on this: Add a keyboard shortcut to mute/unmute; this works well for me in Teams Add an unmute phrase”
“I was using Copilot Code Review pretty religiously for a while, as I get access for free (the $10 plan) due to my Open Source work, but it recently introduced a monster of a misfeature that caused a massive increase in complexity over time, while I wasn't paying close enough attention to it. Every subsequent model saw that change and the explanation for it in the changelog and assumed it was policy rather than a model being brain-damaged, so it became a fractal of fuckery I had to untangle with”
“Copilot has a contract you can enter that says that all use of Copilot is private within that tenant. The issue is that "all use" maybe wasn't including everything you could use Copilot for. But I'm not in that part of the company, so that's only hearsay.”
“Problem Agent Host currently supplies a static GitHub token when creating Copilot SDK sessions. Some GitHub tokens have a known finite lifetime, and the Copilot SDK supports a gitHubTokenProvider callback for refreshing those credentials. Without carrying token lifetime to Agent Host and selecting the provider callback, a long running Copilot session can continue using an expired token or surface an interactive authentication prompt instead of requesting a fresh credential. Desired behavior Carr”
“Not so long ago I wrote a guide on how to get GitHub Copilot running with a local model in Visual Studio Code. Since then Copilot subscriptions have got much more expensive, local models have got much more powerful and getting local Copilot up and running has got much easier. So here's an updated guide. submitted by /u/admcpr [link] [comments]”
“Copilot for VSC, Hermes for spinning up entire projects and documentation and non coding specific stuff, hopefully i will be using Offgrid Desktop and Mobile for general stuff soon if they iron out some bugs since I already bought an early adopter license”
“If you use GitHub Copilot Agent, you've seen it burn tokens wandering your workspace trying to work out which files matter before it writes a single useful line. Copilot Bill Saver (VS Code extension, I'm the author) It front-loads the part Copilot is worst at: knowing where to look. Two ways in Describe the issue — type what's broken. No setup, nothing to install in your app. Click the element — one dev-only <script> tag pasted once, then click the bug in your running app. Eit”
“Type: <b Bug</b Problem For GitHub Copilot Business/Enterprise users, VS Code currently shows my personal AI credit usage relative to the organization's total monthly credit allowance. For example, I currently see approximately: 13.5k credits used / 120k organization wide monthly credits ( 11%) This is useful for understanding my own consumption, but it is difficult to interpret without also knowing how much of the shared organization wide pool has been consumed in total. In a pooled credit mode”
“Copilot Bill Saver - VS Code Extension To ship faster and reduce ai token usage in web developments”
“If you use GitHub Copilot Agent, you might not even realize how often it wastes a lot of tokens and context just wandering around your workspace trying to figure out which files to look at. How it works: It captures local bug evidence, maps likely files deterministically, and bundles them into a clean handoff that Copilot Agent retrieves using #billSaverContext so it starts directly on the right files. Privacy & Control: The tool never calls an AI model, never touches or edits your code, and”
“Are you talking 365 Copilot or Github copilot? If you mean Github, then yeah. But if you mean 365, please elaborate. How do you configure an 'agent' to take actions on behalf of the user? I have used it pretty regularly and it mostly seems like system prompts and read-only connectors, ie a LLM chatbot front-end with some limited data-sources bolted on top. I am genuinely asking because I have been thoroughly disappointed by 365 Copilot after using literally anything else. I would love to”
“Would be nice for those of us whose organization still lives on it. <img width="384" height="214" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user attachments/assets/8b44903e 34d5 40e5 b200 5e349d662241" /”
“[GitHub] ★ 1/5 (v1.273.0) — worked great. then they added a copilot button that replaced my profile button. Can't get rid of it, and to switch profiles you now have to go to home then profile. Why would I want copilot more than my profile. Especially bad if logged in to multiple accounts.”
Is this worth it ? submitted by /u/Ill_Pirate_3232 [link] [comments]
“Description GitHubCopilotAgent exposes unhandled Copilot SDK session events through AIContent.RawRepresentation , including PermissionRequestedEvent . This is sufficient for applications and protocol adapters to define their own mapping. The remaining provider level gap is the permission lifecycle. The Copilot SDK callback model waits inside one active session, while an Agent Framework interaction may need to expose the permission request, end the current agent turn, receive a response in a late”
“Copilot as a full product is totally different now. The UX in VS Code with Copilot is pretty equivalent to Cursor now.”
“"One thing to note is you have to do it in chunks." - what a complete waste of time. Seriously, think about this. This was designed to SAVE you time. Having to spend more than 30 seconds on this task is doing the opposite. It is WASTING your time. I got projects to manage... I don't have time for that shit. "It messes up copying and pasting all for some reason." - that reason is Microsoft security settings. Settings that you won't be able to change and your IT dept mi”
“A lot of glorified search. Some document summarisation, or “compare these two versions and summarise what’s different”. Sometimes to bounce ideas off of for slides - “how could this be more concise” (don’t take it’s advice verbatim, but it can have some useful suggestions).”
“I definitely use. Copilot just made for me an entire presentation using the enterprising template with 7 slides including timelines, visual information flow and executive summary on the correlation of 5 different projects that would take me the whole weekend to make. With Copilot, all I needed was 3 small revisions and was done in less than an hour.”
“Describe the enhancement When an enterprise's pooled AI credit quota (see 459) is exhausted, GitHub can block further Copilot usage enterprise wide until the next billing cycle, if the org/enterprise has disabled additional (overage) usage. The Billing tab has no way to show whether this state is currently active — admins have no visibility into "is our shared pool exhausted right now, and is Copilot consequently blocked for everyone." Researched this against GitHub's official documentation and”
[GitHub] ★ 1/5 (v1.271.0) — i want free copilot tokens
“Claude is superior in every way, shape or form to copilot... no trick licensing and affordable (for now...) copilot is a waste of time and resources.”
“So far since whenever they enabled the sub processor there's no additional charges to run Claude thru Copilot. ... But Ignite hasn't happened yet and I expect an overall Copilot cost increase isn't far away.”
“<img width="802" height="410" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user attachments/assets/c519464e 2fbb 4617 bc39 1818186b3cdb" / That permission picker is for Copilot but it's shown here for Claude.”
“I'd like to have a uniform experience with Copilot regardless of the product – Copilot CLI, Copilot App, and Copilot in the IDE – but that isn't possible today. For example, the handy /review command of the CLI isn't available in the App. The App is nice and conversational, but can't navigate through code like Copilot in the IDE can. Copilot in the IDE is effective, but lacks several features of the other two.How are you working with Copilot? Which products do you use? Especially those folks wh”
“Type: <b Bug</b Give option to ask wheather it want suggestion before i start typing the program VS Code version: Code 1.126.0 (Universal) (7e7950df89d055b5a378379db9ee14290772148a, 2026 06 23T01:46:13Z) OS version: Darwin x64 24.6.0 Modes: <details <summary System Info</summary |Item|Value| | | | |CPUs|Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 8500 CPU @ 3.00GHz (6 x 3000)| |GPU Status|2d canvas: enabled<br GPU0: VENDOR= 0x1002, DEVICE=0x67ef, DRIVER VENDOR=AMD, DRIVER VERSION=15.7.7 ACTIVE <br GPU1: VENDOR= 0x8086”
“Since the beginning of 2026, many projects such as RTK, Caveman, and Ponytail have claimed that they can reduce token usage by 80–90%. Some of them gained tens of thousands of GitHub stars in a very short time.My previous startup was building an e-commerce chatbot. In fact, the product was almost identical to the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). After UCP was released, I decided not to continue pursuing that direction.Earlier this year, I started turning the architecture we had built for e-com”
“code insiders transient Don't sign in ❓ I see Copilot CLI via AH in the dropdown <img width="1791" height="1149" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user attachments/assets/1689a7da 4a4c 43ae badd f9fb1bc7cf6e" /”
“Fair warning, I had GitHub Copilot running Claude Sonnet 4.6 work through the most annoying GitHub Codespaces issue I've ever seen, and I think it's a bug with the web version of VS Code with Safari. A lot of this work was assisted by GitHub Copilot running Claude Sonnet 4.6, and I'll take any blame for this work not being sufficient. I just don't know how to work around this issue. It seems to be totally stuck, so I used my limited ability to generate an easy to reproduce repo of the problem. S”
“Type: <b Bug</b With a copilot license, pasting text is extremely slow, sometimes I have to wait 5 6 secs before vscode shows the pasted text ( 5 normal lines of code). It shows some spinning icon. It looks like syntax highlighting (when typing text) is also lower priority than copilot processing. This happened since the last update got installed. VS Code version: Code 1.110.0 (0870c2a0c7c0564e7631bfed2675573a94ba4455, 2026 03 04T01:20:28.863Z) OS version: Windows NT x64 10.0.22631 Modes:”
“Type: <b Feature Request</b Based on the recent blog post (https://github.blog/changelog/2025 10 16 copilot coding agent can now search the web/), the Copilot Coding Agent now supports web search capabilities. It would be beneficial to integrate this web search feature directly into GitHub Copilot within VS Code, allowing developers to query the web for information, documentation, or code examples without leaving the editor. VS Code version: Code Insiders 1.106.0 insider (9722262df14632ac3c1f167”
“Type: <b Bug</b github copilot is again and again cancelling the api call. i am using groq model, my api key is working and even groq cloud is showing a request call is coming for a model and even it gave back tokens, but the github copilot is just showing cancel error as response. Error: Sorry, your request failed. Please try again. Request id: 48848052 3a32 42f7 b7c3 346e66814a7c Reason: Canceled and same problem is coming with gemini api too Extension version: 0.29.1 VS Code version: Code 1.1”