GitHub Copilot pauses new sign-ups: why you can’t register and what alternatives exist
On April 20, 2026, GitHub announced a review of its individual GitHub Copilot plans, temporarily suspending new sign-ups for Copilot Pro, Copilot Pro+, and Copilot Student, while also adjusting usage limits and the models available.
This article explains the background behind the suspension of new GitHub Copilot sign-ups and what alternatives are available.
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GitHub Copilot pauses new sign-ups
On April 20, 2026, GitHub announced that it would suspend new sign-ups for GitHub Copilot’s paid individual plans and the Student plan.
The free plan, Copilot Free, remains available for registration, and existing users can continue to upgrade between plans.
On April 11, GitHub had already stopped accepting new registrations for Copilot Pro’s free trial, and this latest change means that registration is now no longer available not only for the trial but for all paid individual plans.
Along with this announcement, GitHub also adjusted usage limits and the models that can be used.
The amount of AI usage available under individual plans has been reduced.
With Copilot Pro, all Claude Opus series models are no longer available, and with Copilot Pro+, Claude Opus 4.5 and Claude Opus 4.6 are no longer available.
Claude Opus 4.7 remains available on Copilot Pro+.
For the free GitHub Copilot Student plan, users had already lost the ability to manually select GPT-5.4 or Claude as of March.
If these changes do not suit users, they can cancel their GitHub Pro / GitHub Pro+ subscription, and in that case GitHub says it will not charge them for April usage.
In addition, users who contact GitHub Support between April 20, 2026 and May 20, 2026 can receive a refund.
Why was sign-up suspended?
GitHub cites the fundamental shift in compute demand caused by the expansion of agentic workflows as the reason for this series of changes.
GitHub says that long-running parallel sessions have begun consuming computing resources continuously at levels beyond its original assumptions, raising concerns that overall service quality would decline if the situation continued unchanged.
GitHub Copilot originally launched in 2021 as a service for code completion and for generating simple code from instructions such as comments.
A chat feature was added in 2023, and today AI can operate autonomously based on human prompts in environments such as Agent Mode in VS Code and external tools like OpenCode, automating everything from reading and writing code to verification.
This style of development is often referred to as vibe coding or agentic coding, and because AI operates autonomously for extended periods of time, while some workflows also run multiple agents in parallel, it consumes a large amount of compute resources.
GitHub Copilot’s usage limits are determined by the number of sessions rather than by token count, and as agentic coding becomes more widespread, token usage per user increases.
Against this backdrop, GitHub may be trying to improve Copilot’s profitability.
In addition to suspending new sign-ups and preventing users from selecting some high-performance models as described above, GitHub has also indicated that, starting April 24, it will use GitHub Copilot user data for AI training.
Although not official information, there are also reports suggesting that GitHub may be planning to move Copilot from session-based billing to token-based billing.
What are the alternative services?
Although new sign-ups for GitHub Copilot’s paid plans are no longer available, what alternatives are there?
First, because this suspension applies only to paid plans, one option is to sign up for the Copilot Free plan, despite its stricter limitations.
Another option is to subscribe to paid plans from Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
With these paid plans, Claude offers Claude Code and ChatGPT offers Codex as coding agents, but it is important to note that they do not include a code completion service like GitHub Copilot.
Also, services that let users access models from various providers in a way similar to GitHub Copilot include OpenCode Zen / OpenCode Go and the Zed Pro plan for the Zed code editor.
If a flat-rate subscription is not necessary, users can also use APIs from their preferred model providers.
Conclusion
GitHub has announced that it is suspending new sign-ups for GitHub Copilot’s paid individual plans and the Student plan.
Alternatives include Copilot Free, paid plans for Claude and ChatGPT, paid plans from OpenCode and Zed, and APIs from various providers.
References
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I've been using JavaScript more than my native language since birth. I am nowhere and everywhere on the internet.
I build web apps and browser extensions in TypeScript as a web frontend programmer. I released Shadowban Scanner, a tool that detects shadowbans on X, and Restore Link Card, a tool that brings back link cards. Media outlets in Japan and abroad covered both tools. For iGEM 2023, I built the Wiki for Team Japan-United and helped the team win the Grand Prize. On my blog, I cover news about X and social media, test and troubleshoot bugs, and share frontend development insights.
