There’s a pattern forming. After Anthropic’s experiment with removing Claude Code from the Pro plan, GitHub is following suit — but far more aggressively. New signups for Copilot Pro, Pro+, and Student plans are now paused.
What Happened
Since April 20, no new individual users can sign up for GitHub Copilot Pro. Existing subscribers keep their access, but if you want to join now, you’re locked out.
GitHub’s explanation is remarkably honest: ‘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.’
Translation: the flat-rate math doesn’t work anymore because agents need exponentially more compute than simple code completions.
Opus Removed from Pro
On top of the signup freeze, GitHub has removed Opus models from the cheaper Pro plan. If you want Opus 4.7, you need Pro+. That’s a direct cut to the base tier’s capabilities.
The Bigger Picture
Last week, Anthropic briefly removed Claude Code from its $20 Pro plan — a test that was quickly reversed after backlash. GitHub is going a step further by freezing new signups entirely.
What we’re witnessing is an industry-wide realization: AI coding agents are more expensive than anyone planned for. The flat-rate models from the chatbot era don’t work when agents run for hours or days in the background, making thousands of API calls.
Simon Willison puts it well: the AI industry is in a pricing crisis. Every provider is trying to figure out what an agent actually costs — and who should pay for it.
What This Means for You
If you already have a Copilot subscription, nothing changes immediately. If you need to decide by May 20 whether the new limits work for you, you can cancel and get a prorated refund.
For everyone else: welcome to the new reality. AI coding isn’t getting cheaper — it’s going usage-based. Whether that’s fair depends on how much you actually need.
Sources: GitHub Blog, Simon Willison, The Register