Today closes the first full thirty-day billing cycle since GitHub moved every Copilot plan to token-based usage billing on June 1. Developers running agentic coding sessions on frontier models are reporting bills ten to fifty times higher than their old flat subscriptions. Screenshots on Reddit, X, and GitHub's own discussion forum show $29 plans now totaling $750 and $50 plans reaching $3,000.
GitHub's own research found that agentic coding tasks can consume roughly a thousand times more tokens than a single-turn query. The flat-rate era — set by ChatGPT Plus and copied across the industry — quietly hid that variance, and every team now has to model it. GitHub is cushioning the transition with promotional credits through August ($30 per user on Business, $70 on Enterprise) and a new Copilot Max tier at $100 per month, but the credits disappear on September 1.
This is the most tangible example yet of a broader inference-cost reckoning. Anthropic moved Fable 5 to credits-only in late June. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 family ships in three tiers — Sol at $5/$30 per million tokens, Terra at $2.50/$15, Luna at $1/$6 — explicitly because the labs are no longer willing to subsidize the heaviest users on a single flat plan. The 'unlimited AI for $20' assumption is ending category by category.
Takeaway for learners: if you're using AI coding agents, instrument your token usage now and set hard monthly caps before the bill teaches you. The skill that matters in 2026 isn't 'prompting' — it's knowing which task is worth Sol-class tokens, which can be done with Luna or a smaller open model, and when local inference on a speculative-decoded checkpoint beats either.