GitHub just made a major, and frankly brutal, adjustment to its Copilot personal plans. As of today, April 20th, the company has paused new user registrations for its Pro, Pro+, and Student tiers, tightened usage quotas, and stripped the powerful Claude Opus model from the standard Pro plan. Only the free version, Copilot Free, remains open for new sign-ups.
The three core changes
1. New subscriptions are on pause
GitHub's official line is that it needs to "prioritize service quality for existing paying users," so it's shut the door on new subscriptions for those three paid tiers. Existing users can still upgrade or switch between plans.
2. Usage quotas get squeezed
The quota for Pro+ has been widened to be more than five times that of the Pro tier. The not-so-subtle message? If Pro users keep hitting their limits, GitHub's suggestion is to pony up for Pro+. VS Code and the Copilot CLI will now show warnings as you approach your limit, and a usage progress bar is reportedly coming soon.
3. Pro plan loses Opus
Anthropic's latest flagship model, Claude Opus 4.7, is now exclusive to Pro+ subscribers. GitHub had previously signaled that older Opus versions (4.5 and 4.6) would also be removed from Pro+, meaning Pro+ users will soon have only Opus 4.7 as their Opus option.
Why the sudden crackdown?
The background is simple: AI coding tools have been burning through compute at a staggering rate over the past year. Opus is one of the most expensive inference models on the market, and GitHub's flat monthly fee for a massive user base was a financial equation that stopped making sense. The company had already begun throttling and removing models from Pro+ in late March and early April; this move just swings the axe more decisively. It also effectively repositions the standard Pro tier as an "entry-level option for light users."
Two groups are feeling this the most. First, developers who wanted to start a new Pro or Pro+ subscription—that window is temporarily closed, leaving the free version as the only option. Second, existing Pro subscribers who relied on Opus for complex coding tasks now face a choice: pay up for Pro+ or jump ship to competitors like Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex.
GitHub is offering an off-ramp: users unhappy with these changes can contact support to cancel their subscription between April 20th and May 20th and receive a full refund for April.
This marks the first time a mainstream AI programming tool has publicly shut its paid registration window.