A couple weeks ago I introduced gh-aw-fleet and ended on a confession: I went in solving a drift-tracking problem and walked out with a FinOps one. That was foreshadowing. The bill has since arrived, and I'm late to writing about it, which is about right. The hot takes have burned out and FinOps X has packed up, and what's left is the one question worth keeping: where did the credits actually go?
what changed
On June 1, GitHub moved Copilot to usage-based billing. Premium request units are gone; in their place are AI Credits metered against token consumption: input, output, and cached, at each model's API rate. The sticker prices didn't move (Pro+ is still $39, Business still $19 a seat), but the math underneath did: every chat turn, every agentic session, every Copilot code review now draws down a credit balance. Reviewing a PR with Copilot bills against your Actions minutes too.
The reaction was about what you'd expect. People watched a month of credits evaporate in an afternoon and called it meter shock.
Now point that meter at a fleet. I run a dozen-odd repos with agentic workflows on them (code review, daily doc updates, malicious-code scans), and every one of them is now a little metered faucet.
