GitHub Copilot paused new signups and kicked Opus out of Pro. Here's what actually changed.

GitHub just turned off new signups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student. The announcement went up on April 20, signed by VP of Product Joe Binder, and it was unusually blunt about the reason: “Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support.”

The tl;dr for existing Pro subscribers: Opus is gone from your plan. Limits are tighter. You have until May 20 to cancel and refund if that breaks your workflow.

What actually changed

Three levers moved at once, and it’s worth separating them because they have different timelines and different blast radii.

New signups paused. Pro, Pro+, and Student plans are closed to new customers indefinitely. GitHub didn’t give a reopen date. Enterprise and Business plans are unaffected. If you were about to try Copilot for the first time as an individual, you can’t right now.

Model availability tightened. The big one. All three Claude Opus models (4.5, 4.6, and 4.7) are no longer available on the $10 Pro plan. Opus 4.7 stays on Pro+. Opus 4.5 and 4.6 are being removed from Pro+ as well. That means Pro+ gets exactly one Opus model (the newest), and Pro gets none. GPT-5 variants and Gemini stay in the mix on both tiers.

Usage limits lowered. GitHub didn’t publish the new numbers, but said Pro+ now offers “more than 5X” the limits of Pro. The docs describe two new limit types: per-session caps and weekly (7-day) caps, both weighted by token consumption and a per-model multiplier. Limits are now displayed in VS Code and the Copilot CLI so you can see the runway before you hit the wall.

Existing subscribers keep their plan at the current price. The refund window runs to May 20 for anyone who wants out.

Why GitHub had to do this

The honest answer is in the blog post’s own framing: a single Pro subscriber running an agent can burn more compute in an afternoon than the $10/month plan grossed all year.

Internal Microsoft documents reported by Ed Zitron describe “week-over-week cost of running GitHub Copilot nearly doubling since January.” The math breaks at the premium-model tier. Anthropic prices Opus 4.7 at $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. A 50-minute agentic coding session with tool use, planning, and re-reads can push 500k tokens easily. That’s a few dollars of raw API cost per session. One heavy user can cost Copilot more in inference than their monthly plan fee every day.

Copilot historically billed per request, not per token, which made it an unusually good deal for anyone running an agent: one request could trigger a 200k-token round-trip and still count as one request. The new limits are GitHub’s attempt to plug that gap without going fully metered. Opus 4.7 already carries a 7.5x request multiplier through April 30, compared to 3x for Opus 4.6 and 30x for the since-retired Opus 4.6 Fast. Those multipliers are the first step toward real token accounting.

Simon Willison called out the most confusing part of the announcement: it never specifies which Copilot product is affected. Microsoft has put the Copilot name on roughly 75 different products, from the JetBrains plugin to the Windows 11 sidebar. The changes here only touch the GitHub-branded coding tools on individual plans. Everything else (Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, the OS sidebar) is unaffected.

Anthropic is making the same move

This isn’t a GitHub-only story. On the same weekend, Anthropic quietly pulled Claude Code from the base $20 Claude Pro plan, per user reports on Bluesky that got picked up on the r/ClaudeAI subreddit and Hacker News. Claude Code is now a Max-plan feature. The justification is identical: agent workflows consume far more compute than chat, and the “flat subscription” model doesn’t survive first contact with a tool-calling loop that runs for an hour.

If you squint, the entire industry is re-learning what API providers learned in 2023: flat-rate plans for heavy AI usage don’t pencil out, and you can either ration by limits or switch to usage-based billing. GitHub and Anthropic are picking “both, gradually.”

What this actually costs you

Three scenarios, most to least painful:

You’re on Copilot Pro and Opus is your main model. Your plan gets worse effective April 30 (when Opus 4.7 leaves Pro) or whenever the older Opus models roll off, whichever comes first. You either upgrade to Pro+ at $39/month (a 4x jump), or switch to GPT-5/Gemini on Pro, which remains a perfectly good pairing for most coding tasks but is a step down for multi-file refactors where Opus’s long-context handling matters.

You’re on Pro+ and a heavy Opus user. You keep Opus 4.7, but with tighter session and weekly caps than before. You’ll hit walls sooner than you used to. GitHub’s bet is that 5x the Pro limits is enough runway for the median Pro+ user. The top decile of users will feel this.

You were planning to sign up new. You can’t. Cursor, Windsurf, Zed’s AI mode, and direct Claude Code (on a Max plan) are the realistic alternatives right now. The good news: the market has more mature options than it did even six months ago.

The caveats

A few things worth tracking before you overreact.

First, the pause on new signups is explicitly framed as temporary (“to protect the experience for existing customers”). GitHub’s incentive is to reopen the funnel once capacity and billing architecture catch up. History says that takes quarters, not weeks.

Second, “Opus removed from Pro” doesn’t mean Pro is now useless. GPT-5.4, Gemini 2.5, and the mid-tier Claude Sonnet stay on Pro. For ~80% of what an individual developer does (autocomplete, small refactors, boilerplate generation), Sonnet-class models are the correct pick anyway. Opus earns its keep on long-context, multi-file reasoning, which is also exactly the kind of workload that blows through the limits fastest.

Third, the 5x multiplier gap between Pro+ and Pro is a specific number and GitHub may tune it. If usage data shows Pro+ users still hitting walls often, expect another round of limit changes inside 60 days.

Why you’re hearing about this now

Two things collided in the second half of April. The first is that agentic coding workflows crossed from “research demo” to “what half the Hacker News frontpage is using daily” over the past six months, and the compute curve finally caught up to the billing curve. The second is that Anthropic just shipped Opus 4.7, which pushed the price-per-token up enough that the math broke loudly instead of quietly.

The broader shift here is that individual developers are no longer the cheap part of the AI-coding customer base. Agent sessions shift who’s expensive: a solo dev on Pro+ can burn more tokens than a 50-seat Enterprise account where everyone is doing chat-style assists. GitHub’s new limits are the first serious re-pricing of that reality from a major vendor, and they won’t be the last. Cursor, Windsurf, and the smaller IDE plugins are all selling subscriptions that assume the same old chat-style usage profile. They will face the same math within a quarter or two.

If you’re evaluating coding tools this quarter, read the fine print on token caps and model multipliers before the monthly number, not after. The sticker price matters less than how many agent runs you can actually fit inside it.