GitHub will bill card and PayPal customers up front for Copilot Business and Enterprise seats

GitHub's Aug 28 changelog lays out three Copilot changes: up-front seat billing on Business and Enterprise plans for customers who pay by card or PayPal, one unified chat and cloud-agent experience, and a heavier default effort for Copilot code review.

Key points

• The billing changes cover Business and Enterprise customers who pay by card or PayPal: each newly assigned seat must be paid for before that user gets Copilot access, all assigned seats are charged up front at the start of the billing cycle (for existing customers, starting Oct 1), and extra payment may be needed once included usage runs out.
• GitHub said it would start re-enabling Business and Enterprise sign-ups for card and PayPal payers from Sep 1; its Sep 3 update says sign-ups are reopening gradually over the following couple of weeks, so the plan you want may not be open yet.
• Seat prices stay the same and mid-cycle additions are still prorated; as before, dropping a seat brings no prorated refund, and the removal simply shows up on the next monthly bill.
• No earlier than Sep 28, Copilot Chat on github.com, the GitHub Mobile chat and the cloud agent become one product governed by a single policy that is switched on by default.
• Because github.com chat moves onto the agent-sessions model, conversations are kept as long as the account exists rather than expiring after 28 days. Anyone who opts out of the unified experience loses Copilot on the website and the mobile app.
• Starting Sep 28, repositories and organizations left on the Default review effort get Balanced instead of Lite; choosing Lite explicitly before that date keeps it.

“retained for the life of the account instead of 28 days” — GitHub changelog

Why it matters

A tiny studio that already pays for one or two Copilot Business seats by card will be charged for them up front, at the start of the billing cycle, from Oct 1, a small but real cash-flow shift. The heavier code-review default means Copilot puts more effort into every automatically requested review unless you dial it back; GitHub's code review docs say Balanced uses a stronger reasoning model and more AI credits than Lite. The indefinite chat retention is worth knowing before pasting client code into Copilot Chat on github.com.

This is an AI-written summary of the GitHub changelog credited above and GitHub's Sep 3 update and code review docs linked in the text, read and edited by Nicholas before publishing. The facts and the quote belong to GitHub; the wording is ours. Read the original.