Which GitHub Copilot Plan Should You Actually Buy?

Which GitHub Copilot Plan Should You Actually Buy?/blog/which-github-copilot-plan/

There are seven Copilot tiers and five of them cost money. Most guides hand you a feature matrix and leave the decision with you. This one makes the recommendation, then shows the reasoning — because for the majority of people the right answer is one of three plans, and for a meaningful minority the right answer is to pay nothing at all.

Start here: are you eligible for a free plan that is better than the paid entry tier?

Two groups should check this before spending anything.

Students. Copilot Student is free with verification, and it is not a crippled tier. It includes unlimited code completions, the cloud agent, and full code review — all three of which Copilot Free does not have. On the features that matter day to day it is closer to Pro than to Free. If you are eligible and paying for Pro, you are very likely wasting $10 a month.

Verified teachers and maintainers of popular open source projects. GitHub grants Copilot Pro free to both. This is documented and routinely missed.

That is the single highest-value paragraph on this page. Check eligibility before reading further.

The default answer: Copilot Pro, $10 a month

For an individual developer who writes code most days, Pro at $10/month is the right plan and the decision does not need much analysis. It unlocks model choice, the cloud agent, code review and the full Copilot CLI.

The question worth asking is not “Pro or Free” but “Pro or nothing” — and Free answers that for you. Copilot Free caps completions at 2,000 a month and offers automatic model selection only. That cap is generous enough to evaluate the product and too tight to rely on it. Use Free for a fortnight, decide whether the completions are earning their keep, then buy Pro or stop.

When to go past Pro

Pro+ is $39/month and Max is $100/month. Both buy the same thing: more monthly allowance, plus priority access to premium models at Max.

Understanding what you are buying requires understanding how the allowance works. Every plan includes a monthly allowance of GitHub AI Credits. Paid individual plans split it in two: base credits, matched to your subscription price and fixed, and a flex allotment on top that GitHub can adjust as model economics change. Base credits are spent first. The same rates apply whether the request comes from your IDE, from github.com, or from Copilot CLI.

So the upgrade question is not about features. It is: do you run out?

• If you have never hit the ceiling on Pro, Pro+ buys you nothing you are using.
• If you hit it in the third week of every month, Pro+ is $29 to stop rationing.
• Max at $100 is for people running agents heavily and continuously. If you are not sure whether that is you, it is not.

Teams: Business at $19, and when Enterprise is worth $39

Once more than one person is involved the calculation changes completely, because you stop buying capability and start buying control.

Copilot Business, $19 per granted seat per month. This is the tier where organizational governance begins: content exclusion, policy management, audit logs, managed seats, and organization-wide custom instructions. It includes 1,900 credits per user per month, pooled across the organization — pooling matters more than the number, because it means a heavy user and a light user average out instead of one being blocked.

Copilot Enterprise, $39 per granted seat per month. Doubles the pooled allowance to 3,900 per user and adds the Enterprise-tier controls. It requires GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

The honest test for whether you need Enterprise rather than Business:

1. Are you on GitHub Enterprise Cloud? If not, the question is settled — you cannot buy it.
2. Do you need policy control at the enterprise level across multiple organizations, rather than per organization? Note that precedence here is asymmetric and surprising, and it is worth reading how policy precedence actually resolves before assuming it works the way you expect.
3. Is 1,900 pooled credits per user genuinely not enough? For most teams it is.

If you answered no to two of those three, buy Business and revisit in a quarter.

Frequently asked questions

Is GitHub Copilot Pro worth $10 a month? If you write code most working days, it is a low bar to clear — $10 is roughly fifteen minutes of a developer’s time in most markets. The useful version of this question is whether you will change how you work to use it, because people who leave it on and ignore it get very little. Try Free for two weeks first; that is what it is for.

What is the difference between Copilot Student and Copilot Free? Student is substantially better and also free. Student gives unlimited completions, the cloud agent and full code review; Free caps completions at 2,000 a month, has no cloud agent, and offers only partial code review (“Review selection” in VS Code). If you qualify as a student, there is no reason to be on Free.

Does Copilot Business include everything in Pro? Business is a different axis, not simply a higher tier. It adds organizational control — exclusion, policy, audit, pooled credits — which individual plans do not have. Compare on governance, not on features.

What happens when I run out of credits? You can upgrade your plan, or set an Additional usage budget to buy more. Nothing breaks silently, but work does stop until you do one or the other.

Can I switch plans later? Yes. This is why the analysis above biases towards buying less: the cost of starting on Pro and moving up is one month of rationing, while the cost of starting on Max is $90 a month you may not need.

The short version

For the full tier-by-tier breakdown of what each plan contains, see the Copilot plans comparison.