GitHub Copilot offers four plans. The Free tier launched in December 2024 with limited completions. Business and Enterprise are billed per seat.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot Free | $0 | $0 | 2,000 completions/mo, 50 chat messages/mo |
| Copilot Pro | $10/mo | $100/yr | Unlimited completions, Claude 3.5 Sonnet access |
| Copilot Pro+ | $39/mo | $390/yr | Premium models (GPT-4o, o1), 1,500 premium requests |
| Copilot Business | $19/user/mo | $19/user/mo | Teams: policy controls, audit logs, no training on code |
| Copilot Enterprise | $39/user/mo | $39/user/mo | Large orgs: custom models, PR summaries, knowledge bases |
Prices verified April 2026. GitHub adjusts Copilot pricing and features as the AI coding market evolves — get automatic alerts when pricing changes.
GitHub Copilot has gone through major price restructuring since its public launch. Here's the complete record:
The 90% Business plan increase hit engineering teams hard — especially those who adopted early at the $10 rate and had it baked into their budgets.
| Team size | Old cost (Business at $10) | New cost (Business at $19) | Annual extra spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 devs | $600/yr | $1,140/yr | +$540/yr |
| 15 devs | $1,800/yr | $3,420/yr | +$1,620/yr |
| 30 devs | $3,600/yr | $6,840/yr | +$3,240/yr |
| 100 devs | $12,000/yr | $22,800/yr | +$10,800/yr |
The Business plan jump to $19/seat created a significant opening for AI coding competitors. The main alternatives that benefited:
Cursor ($20/user/mo for Business): Nearly identical price but with more aggressive AI features — multi-file context, codebase-wide search, and a faster iteration cycle. Many teams switching from Copilot at $19 see Cursor as the obvious alternative. See our Copilot vs Cursor comparison.
Tabnine (from $12/user/mo): Positioned as the privacy-first alternative with on-premise deployment options. Enterprises with strict data policies increasingly chose Tabnine after Copilot's price jumped.
Amazon CodeWhisperer / Q Developer (free for individuals): AWS's offering has aggressive free tiers and integrates well into AWS-heavy environments. The free individual tier directly competes with Copilot Free.
If you sell any developer tool — IDE extensions, CI/CD, code review, developer platforms — GitHub Copilot's pricing is directly relevant to your competitive positioning. Monitor Copilot pricing changes automatically.
PricePulse monitors GitHub Copilot's pricing page hourly. When anything changes, you get an email with the exact before/after diff — before your competitors see it.
Set up Copilot alert — free See how it worksYes — GitHub Copilot has a free tier with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, launched in December 2024. It's sufficient for occasional use but not for daily professional development. The paid Pro plan ($10/month) removes these limits entirely.
GitHub (Microsoft) raised Business pricing from $10 to $19/seat in 2024 — a 90% increase — citing added enterprise features: organization-wide policy management, audit logs, and IP indemnity protections. Critics argued the feature additions didn't justify a near-doubling of price, especially for teams that had locked in at $10/seat.
Copilot Pro ($10/month) includes unlimited completions and chat with standard models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet). Copilot Pro+ ($39/month) adds access to premium reasoning models (o1, o3-mini), 1,500 premium model requests per month, and priority access to new features. Pro+ is for developers who want the absolute best AI models, not just productivity assistance.
Yes — GitHub offers Copilot Pro free to verified students through GitHub Student Developer Pack. Open-source maintainers of popular projects can also apply for free access. This has not changed with the pricing overhaul.
At $19/seat for Business, Copilot becomes harder to justify compared to alternatives. Research consistently shows 20-35% productivity gains for developers who use AI coding assistants regularly — which at $19/month is still a strong ROI if developers are actively using it. The question is whether you need the Business-specific controls (SSO, audit logs) or whether individual Pro plans at $10/month are sufficient for your team.