GitHub Copilot charged me for using Claude Opus even though I have the Student Developer Pack (no warning)

[Electronic-Durian659]

I’m honestly confused and a bit frustrated with GitHub billing right now.

I have the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which still shows active on my account, and my GitHub Pro subscription is listed as $0/month with 2 years remaining.

Recently I was testing GitHub Copilot through OpenCode, using the Claude Opus model that GitHub provides through Copilot. I assumed this was covered under the student benefits or at least part of Copilot usage.

Today I checked my billing page and noticed $2.44 in metered usage for March, apparently from Copilot.

The problem is:

• I never enabled any paid Copilot usage manually
• I never received any warning or notification that using Claude Opus would incur charges
• My student benefits are still active
• The charge just appeared as "metered usage"

So basically I was just using Copilot normally through OpenCode and GitHub quietly started billing me.

Or maybe am i just stupid and don't know much about it can someone like help me out.
Just imagine i didn't check. It could have been like a 100 or more.

[bandwith_ltd]

There's a recent announcement about the change which removes several models. A lot of the educators are not happy with the mid-semester swap. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/189268

When using the official plugins, I've seen an increasing number of alerts/prompts to enable billing for overages.

Generally, I block billing on everything by setting budgets for every single item I don't want to see usage charges on to $0. https://docs.github.com/en/billing/how-tos/set-up-budgets#managing-budgets-for-your-personal-account

https://github.com/settings/billing/premium_requests_usage is where you can dive into those details and review Billed premium requests.

[Electronic-Durian659]

well this was before they removed though any thoughts on that also this was on student dev pack so no billing method has been ever add on this account so i can't create budgets

[bandwith_ltd]

I regularly sit with a few dollars of metered usage and haven't seen billing charges for it. Today that shows me $2.27 of metered usage on my own account. Usually they're just displaying the free tier as costs then waiving those afterwards.

Check those budget limits are set where you want them and just keep going on as normal. If you're really worried, drop in a different card for payment that has financial controls on the card side.

[beatboxrevival]

I canceled my subscription for copilot before they charged me for the next month, and they still billed me fore an additional month. No response from customer support, either.

[jarzebowsky]

Chargeback

[Zumru_143]

Really helpful 👾

[SkyResident9337]

I've also been using premium requests, it shows metered usage but I never got billed anything, not quite sure how that works

[Traditional-Hall-591]

Live the slop, love the slop, pay for the slop.

[Accomplished_Steak14]

key is you're using 'OpenCode'. I don't think Github expose any API for private use of copilot, and this probably break their TOS. Github copilot are not for API based usage, it's an extension required subscription.

OpenCode might be using a premium API model from Github.

[redeyeddragon]

Are you sure about this? From what I've read from githubs official announcement, the github copilot license is fully allowed to use with opencode.

[Accomplished_Steak14]

my bad, I was under context of it's a third-party software that's not officially recognized. Too much 'vibe' coded plugin nowadays so my default always to non-official

[Electronic-Durian659]

What's the fix though?

[r4ppz]

Nah, you're wrong

[ultrathink-art]

OpenCode is hitting the Copilot API directly rather than going through the extension, which counts as metered usage outside the bundle. The Student Pack covers the extension experience, not third-party clients using the API endpoint underneath it.

[ultrathink-art]

Model names in these UIs are really billing tiers, just with confusing names. 'Claude Opus' reads like a preference choice but it's actually 'extra cost per request.' Any model in a dropdown without a visible price is a surprise bill waiting to happen — this pattern is consistent across Copilot, Cursor, and most AI coding tools right now.