By Thomas Claburn
Publication Date: 2026-04-28 00:31:00
Microsoft is closing the AI buffet offered to GitHub Copilot customers, acknowledging that it can’t sell AI like Red Lobster’s Endless Shrimp.
The US seafood restaurant’s all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion led the company to bankruptcy in 2024 and while Microsoft is nowhere near so financially overextended, the software giant’s code hosting biz has decided it no longer wants Copilot to operate at a loss.
GitHub is therefore shifting Copilot from request-based billing to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026.
GitHub absorbed much of the escalating inference cost, but the current premium request model is no longer sustainable
Under request-based billing, GitHub Copilot subscribers will be allowed to submit a set number of premium requests, with certain models priced at a higher request rate but without any consideration for the complexity of the request. So complex prompts that require a lot of “thinking” often cost GitHub more than the company earned in subscription fees.
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