Managing your company's spending on GitHub Copilot

When you're adopting GitHub Copilot in an enterprise, you will want to set budgets and track spending to ensure your rollout is sustainable. GitHub offers billing tools to help you visualize your spending patterns, receive alerts when you reach budget thresholds, and optimize your license usage.

Understand who can grant licenses

To control spending, it's important to understand who can affect your bill by granting licenses to users. These are people with the organization owner role in organizations where you enable GitHub Copilot. Organization owners can receive requests for access from members through the GitHub UI.

We recommend that you identify the people with this role and communicate with them about your company's strategy for distributing licenses. For example, you may have a budget or limited pilot program, or you may distribute licenses through an internal website.

Manage charges for premium requests

Each Copilot plan includes a per-user allowance for premium requests:

• 300 requests per month for Copilot Business
• 1000 requests per month for Copilot Enterprise

Copilot Chat, Copilot agent mode, Copilot code review, and Copilot Extensions use premium requests, with usage varying by model.

Premium requests over the allowance are rejected unless you have enabled overage billing. Depending on the type of development tasks your developers use Copilot for, you may find developers need to make more premium requests than the allowance included in your plan.

If you enable overage billing, premium requests over the allowance are charged at a rate of $0.04 USD per request, with an additional multiplier applied to certain models. You can also increase your monthly allowance by upgrading to Copilot Enterprise.

For pricing details and a list of available models, see Subscription plans for GitHub Copilot.

Enabling overage billing

You can enable or disable overage billing for all users in your enterprise, or for your organization if you use an organization that is not part of an enterprise account.

1. Go to the Copilot policies page in your organization or enterprise.
   • Enterprise: Go to the enterprise, click Policies, click Copilot in the left sidebar, then click the Policies tab.
   • Organization: Go to the organization, click Settings, click Copilot in the left sidebar, then click Policies.
2. Next to "Additional Copilot premium requests", click the toggle to enable overages.

Tracking premium requests

You can view a CSV report that shows the cumulative number of premium requests per user over a time period. You can use this report to:

• Understand if developers are frequently hitting the limit and would benefit from you enabling overage billing or upgrading your plan.
• Identify users who are making a large number of premium requests over the limit, and follow up to the users to understand their use cases and requirements.
• After enabling overage billing, track usage to determine if it would be more cost effective to upgrade to Copilot Enterprise.

You can download the report for an enterprise account, or for an organization that is not part of an enterprise.

1. Go to your enterprise or organization account settings and click Billing & Licensing.
2. In the left sidebar, click Usage.
3. To download the usage report, select Get usage report in the upper-right corner of the page, and click Copilot premium requests usage report.

Map spending to groups of users

With GitHub's new billing platform, you can create cost centers to map spending to individual business units or groups of users. Cost centers allow you to track costs tied to different initiatives and charge the costs to specific areas of your business.

For example, if you were running a pilot program for GitHub Copilot Enterprise for a group of employees, you might want to create a cost center to track their spending and set a budget independently of the rest of the company.

Create a cost center

1. Go to your enterprise or organization account settings and click Billing & Licensing.

2. In the left sidebar, click Cost centers, then click New cost center.

3. Create the cost center. You don't need to add any repositories or organizations, because you will add users to the cost center directly in the next step.

   Note

   As a priority, a cost center is charged for a Copilot license if the assigned user has been added to the cost center directly. As a fallback, a cost center is charged for the license if the organization where the user receives access has been added to the cost center.

4. After creating the cost center, use the REST API to add the users whose usage you want to track. See REST API endpoints for enterprise billing.

Receive alerts for overspending

With GitHub's new billing platform, you can ensure your spending on GitHub Copilot is manageable by setting a monthly budget. A budget for Copilot won't limit usage, but you will receive notifications by email when spending exceeds certain percentages of the budget you've set.

You can create the budget for the whole enterprise or for a cost center.

1. Go to your enterprise or organization account settings and click Billing & Licensing.
2. In the left sidebar, click Budgets and alerts.
3. Click New budget.
4. Select Copilot as the product, then configure the settings as required. You can choose who receives alerts when budget thresholds are reached.
5. Click Create budget.

Visualize spending trends

With GitHub's new billing platform, you can understand your spending trends by viewing a graph for Copilot usage over a certain timeframe. For more detailed insights, you can filter the results by cost center and group usage by the type of Copilot plan.

1. Go to your enterprise or organization account settings and click Billing & Licensing.
2. In the left sidebar, click Usage.
3. In the "Metered usage" section, in the search field, enter product:copilot. To filter by cost center, add a query like cost_center:ce-pilot-group.
4. To understand spending differences between Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise plans, select the Group: None dropdown menu and click Group: SKU.

Optimize license usage

When you begin rolling out Copilot in a company, you may see low rates of adoption at first. An effective enablement process is essential to drive adoption of Copilot in your company. Tailor this process to your company's needs and goals, and design it to help your teams understand how to use Copilot effectively.

To ensure your licenses are being used effectively, you can use the API to identify inactive users. We recommend sending these users a message with advice and resources for getting started. If a user remains inactive, you can revoke their license and assign it to another user.

If you're not sure how best to distribute licenses, GitHub has found that many successful rollouts offer a fully self-service model where developers can claim a license without approval. This allows people to get started quickly and ensures you're giving licenses to people who plan to use them.

For detailed guidance, see:

• Driving Copilot adoption in your company
• Setting up a self-serve process for GitHub Copilot licenses
• Reminding inactive users to use their GitHub Copilot license