Copilot Pricing Guide: GitHub Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Every Version Explained

The Copilot Product Lineup

Microsoft now has multiple products called "Copilot," and it is genuinely confusing. A developer searching for "Copilot pricing" might need GitHub Copilot for code completions, Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word and Excel, or could get by with the free Windows Copilot. Here is every product with its pricing clearly separated.

GitHub Copilot Pricing Deep Dive

GitHub Copilot is the AI coding assistant that most developers mean when they search for "Copilot pricing." It has four tiers, including a free option introduced in late 2024 that many developers still do not know about.

The free tier provides 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. That works out to roughly 100 completions per workday. If you accept about one in four suggestions, that is 25 useful completions per day. For developers who code 1 to 2 hours daily (managers, part-time contributors), the free tier is often sufficient. Developers who code 6 or more hours per day will typically exhaust the free allocation by mid-afternoon.

Individual at $10/month (or $100/year) removes all usage limits and adds multiple model choices including GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet. This is the right plan for solo developers, freelancers, and anyone who codes regularly and wants unlimited AI suggestions throughout the day. The annual plan saves $20 per year.

Business at $19/user/month adds the features that matter for teams and companies: organization-wide policy management, user provisioning, audit logs, and IP indemnity. IP indemnity means Microsoft will defend your company legally if Copilot-generated code is found to infringe on intellectual property. For any company using AI-generated code in production, this legal protection alone justifies the $9/month premium over Individual. Business also guarantees that your code is never used for model training and provides fine-grained telemetry controls.

Enterprise at $39/user/month is designed for large engineering organizations. It adds knowledge bases (index your internal documentation so Copilot can answer questions from it), fine-tuned code suggestions based on your codebase patterns, Copilot in github.com (not just the IDE), and automatic pull request summaries. The ROI calculation is straightforward: if a developer earning $75/hour loaded cost saves 30 minutes per day, that is $37.50 in daily productivity savings against a cost of about $1.95 per day.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Pricing Context

Microsoft 365 Copilot costs $30 per user per month, billed annually. But that is an add-on charge on top of your existing Microsoft 365 subscription, which means the real cost per employee is higher than it first appears.

For a 50-person company on Business Premium, the math works out to: 50 users x $22/mo for M365, plus 50 users x $30/mo for Copilot, equaling $1,100 + $1,500 = $2,600 per month or $31,200 per year just for the Copilot add-on plus base subscription. That is a significant investment that requires clear ROI justification.

Unlike GitHub Copilot which can be purchased for individual users, Microsoft 365 Copilot is typically deployed organization-wide or to specific departments. Microsoft requires annual commitment for the Copilot add-on, so there is no monthly billing option. This makes it critical to pilot with a small team before rolling out across the organization.

GitHub Copilot vs Cursor Pricing

Cursor has emerged as GitHub Copilot's strongest competitor for AI-assisted coding. Cursor Pro costs $20/month and includes unlimited AI chat, code completions, and uses Claude and GPT-4o. Cursor Business costs $40/user/month. The fundamental difference is that Cursor is a complete IDE (a VS Code fork) while GitHub Copilot is an extension you add to your existing editor.

For a deeper analysis including real workflows and developer testimonials, read our full Copilot vs Cursor comparison.

GitHub Copilot vs Claude Code Pricing

Claude Code represents an entirely different paradigm from GitHub Copilot. While Copilot suggests code completions inline within your editor, Claude Code operates as a terminal-based AI agent that can edit multiple files, run commands, and understand entire codebases. The pricing models reflect these fundamental differences.

Claude Code is available through usage-based API pricing (roughly $5 to $50 per month depending on how much you use it), through a Claude Pro subscription at $20/month, or through Claude Max at $100 to $200/month for heavy users. GitHub Copilot Individual at $10/month is simpler and cheaper for developers who want inline code suggestions. Claude Code is more powerful for complex multi-file refactoring, large codebase understanding, and multi-step tasks that require running commands and verifying results.

Read our full Copilot vs Claude Code comparison for a detailed analysis of when each tool makes sense and the true cost at different usage levels.

Is Microsoft 365 Copilot Worth $30/User/Month?

The ROI argument for M365 Copilot sounds compelling on paper: if Copilot saves 30 minutes per day for a knowledge worker earning $50/hour, that is $25/day in productivity savings against $1.50/day in cost. That looks like a 16x return. But real-world adoption data paints a more nuanced picture.

Early data from Microsoft's own Work Trend Index suggests average time savings of 10 to 15 minutes per day, not 30. That still yields positive ROI ($8 to $12 in savings versus $1.50 in cost per day), but the return is 5x to 8x rather than the 16x best-case scenario. The variance depends heavily on role and how much time the employee spends in Microsoft 365 applications.

Best for: executives who live in Outlook and Teams, project managers who create reports and status summaries, sales teams who draft proposals in Word, and analysts who work extensively with Excel data. These roles see the highest time savings because they spend most of their day in M365 apps where Copilot can directly assist.

Least useful for: developers (use GitHub Copilot instead), field workers who rarely open Office apps, employees who primarily use non-Microsoft tools like Google Workspace, Slack, or Notion, and roles where work is primarily physical or in-person. Paying $30/month for someone who opens Word twice a week delivers poor ROI no matter how you calculate it.