GitHub is the world's biggest provider of code hosting, version control, and developer collaboration. It is used by more than 100 million developers around the world. It has a free plan which already includes unlimited public and private repositories; the GitHub Copilot, its artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, works separately from the main plans and has its own set of free, paid and student plans.
Unlimited public repositories, unlimited private repositories, and unlimited collaborators on both — all free, forever, without any payment card required. Actual limitations lie elsewhere – 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes per month for private repositories, 500 MB of package storage and Dependabot security alerts rather than the more advanced Advanced Security tools. Public repositories have all the Actions minutes for free and unlimited as well.
Your monthly allowance of Actions minutes is calculated in Linux-equivalent minutes; Windows jobs drain your allowance twice quicker and macOS jobs ten times as fast. A 5-minute-long build on macOS runners counts as 50 minutes against your monthly allowance. This is probably the most shocking limitation of GitHub for many teams — a workflow looking cheap on paper may drain all of your monthly allowance in days.
On June 1, 2026, GitHub switched from its old model of "Premium Request Units" to usage-based AI Credits which measure the actual amount of tokens consumed, rather than the number of requests made. Plan prices have not changed (Free, Pro $10/month, Pro+ $39/month, Max $100/month, Business $19/seat, Enterprise $39/seat), but how your usage is calculated now changed. Inline code completions and next-edit suggestions remain free on every paid plan regardless of credits; only chat, agent mode, code review and Copilot CLI drain your credit allowance.
Starting from March 12, 2026, GitHub stopped giving Copilot for free via a free Copilot Pro seat and started giving it for free via a dedicated "Copilot Student" plan in GitHub Education. If you were a verified student previously, you did not have to re-apply for the new plan – the status was automatically renewed. But now you do not choose which AI model to use anymore (GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus are out of the question here) — you receive the "Auto mode" which routes requests between different models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
Apart from the Copilot access, verified students gain access to the GitHub Student Developer Pack — a bundle of dozens of developer tools and cloud credits provided by third-party companies for free as long as your student status remains verified. GitHub checks your eligibility status roughly once a year (some sources say that Copilot Student plan is checked monthly); you may suddenly lose access to the premium pack without any prior warning.
Verified teachers and the maintainers of popular open source projects are also eligible for free Copilot Pro – this is a totally different path from the student one. It is not enough to have some open source repositories – you should contact GitHub to verify your status.
Once you exceed your allowed number of Actions minutes, their pricing dropped dramatically in early 2026 — Linux 2-core minutes dropped from $0.008 to $0.006, Windows minutes from $0.016 to $0.010 and macOS minutes saw a comparable reduction. The reduction was accompanied by an additional platform fee of $0.002/minute, so it does not really change anything but how the pricing is calculated.
GitHub Team ($4/user/month) adds mandatory pull request reviewers, code owners and protected branches – collaboration features which are useful for multi-developer projects and not for individual contributors. GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/month) adds SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning and much bigger included Actions minutes (50,000/month), because it addresses the compliance and access-control needs of enterprises which cannot be solved by Free and Team plans.
Yes — unlimited private repos and unlimited collaborators is included in the permanently free plan. What is limited is Actions minutes (2,000/month), package storage (500 MB) and advanced security tooling, not the repositories themselves.
Check the operating systems your workflows run on. Windows workflows consume your minutes twice as fast and macOS workflows consume them ten times as fast as shown — just a few builds on macOS runners may consume your monthly allowance of 2,000 minutes faster than you think.
Yes — periodically. GitHub checks your eligibility on an ongoing basis (annually according to some sources, monthly according to GitHub's documentation for the current Copilot Student plan). If your student email or status becomes outdated, your access may be revoked without any warnings except eligibility check.
GitHub replaced "Premium Request Units" with token-based AI Credits – plan prices have not changed, but now usage is metered by actual number of tokens consumed for chat, agent mode, code review and CLI use, not by the number of requests.
Yes, if you are a verified teacher or a maintainer of a sufficiently popular open-source project – this is two completely different paths from the student one, which requires its own verification by GitHub. It is not automatic based on the number of public repositories.
Team adds collaboration features (mandatory reviewers, code owners, protected branches) suited for small-to-mid teams. Enterprise adds SAML SSO, SCIM provisioning and much bigger Actions minutes allowance (50,000 vs 3,000 for Team), because it is aimed at larger organizations with compliance needs.
No. Overage pricing of hosted runners was reduced by up to 39% starting from January 1, 2026, even after adding a new small platform fee per minute.