GitHub Copilot desktop released amid reliability and pricing concerns

GitHub scaling fast as a reliable utility

Many developers have come to rely on GitHub as critical infrastructure.

“A lot of open source developers, you know, they don’t make money and they’re volunteering to build this cool stuff that the whole world runs on,” Kyler Middleton, senior DevOps engineer said. “But GitHub has to work.”

At the same time, the economics of running a platform at GitHub's scale are becoming more challenging.

“I empathize with [GitHub] in that way, because a lot of this stuff they provide for free, for goodwill,” Middleton said. “They give [users] free AI. AI is expensive. In return, they’re getting burned to the ground with agentic stuff just consuming their APIs like crazy.”

Amid scaling rapidly and migrating to Azure to help handle the increased load, GitHub has logged hundreds of incidents and leadership issued a public apology for the downtime. AWS and GitHub spokespeople would neither confirm nor deny a published report this week that GitHub will be using AWS cloud infrastructure to handle the increased load.

The real question is how GitHub will rearchitect itself in the long run, Omdia’s Volk said.

“Architecture plays a big role here. There is a lot of it, and most of it was built a long time ago,” Volk said. “While Microsoft obviously has the resources to get this fixed, the question is whether they also have the strategic commitment to re-engineer the GitHub platform itself, instead of churning out more Copilot features and capabilities to catch up with Claude and Codex.”

In the meantime, one solution to handle the load would be to lower rate limits, but this could risk pushing developers away.

"If [GitHub's] rate limits go to too low to protect themselves, then people will find another platform that's willing to accept that traffic for a while," Middleton said.

While there are alternatives to the GitHub platform, such as GitLab, BitBucket and CodeBerg, switching is no mean feat. Companies must deal with Workflows, Actions, compliance considerations and the broader GitHub ecosystem. 

“Migrating won’t be trivial for companies that are entrenched in GitHub, as there are lots of third-party integrations that have to be untangled,” said Volk. “[It’s a] bit like leaving VMWare. Everyone was pissed at them, but only a few actually moved because of the risk, pain and cost attached to that.”

The GitHub Copilot app

The Copilot app was designed to improve developers’ experience with agent workflows by limiting the amount of context switching they need to do. This ideally frees developers up to focus on quality, policy and delivery.

“The friction of contributing to open source and contributing to code bases has been lowered so much that there’s burden on the folks who have to review said code,” said Cassidy Williams, senior director of developer advocacy at GitHub. “I think the big thing that all of us are hoping is that this improves the code that sticks, this improves the code that goes out and reduces that kind of mental overhead of review and maintenance.”

Some of the features of the new desktop app include:

• Canvases, which is where the agent can show its work and the developer can review or change it.
• Cloud and local sandboxes.
• Code review and model routing features.
• Voice mode using on-device speech-to-text.
• A security review feature which can give Copilot a dedicated path for security-focused evaluation.
• A rubber duck skill that can consult a different model family to vet the work being done.
• Access to Copilot SDK
• Git worktrees that enable parallel agent sessions, keep them overwriting each other’s changes and provide context to the agent.

As of June 16, 2026, the app was still in technical preview. Pro, Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise plans could obtain access. Users without a paid subscription could not.

GitHub expressed the hope that Copilot will enable developers and give them the choice and flexibility to work how they want. “It’s yet another surface for developers to run agents,” Williams said. “It’s nice to have a user interface where I can have a bit more overview and a bit more control.”

In contrast to previous iterations of Copilot that lived inside of the IDE, the new desktop app integrates with the entire GitHub workflow in a single workspace. GitHub's move to bring Copilot to the Desktop also aligns with what made OpenClaw so popular.

"OpenClaw showed how important easy OS-level access for agents is," Volk said.

Prices go up, GitHub goes down, developers weigh options

As the GitHub Copilot app was rolled out in technical preview, GitHub Copilot’s pricing change also went into effect. All GitHub Copilot plans transitioned to usage-based billing, with each plan receiving a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits and the option to purchase more.

Some anonymous users posted on forums about leaving the platform because of the pricing change, claiming 10x price increases, complaining about a sudden transition with no time to prepare and criticizing the practice of charging for output tokens when the output is non-deterministic.

The pricing change came after months of consistent reliability issues with the broader GitHub platform. HashiCorp cofounder, Mitchell Hashimoto, took his startup, terminal emulator Ghostyy, off the platform in late April. “For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X.” he wrote in a public blog post.

Some developers are questioning GitHub’s reliability. When GitHub’s services go down, it makes it difficult for developers to do their jobs, they said.

“When GitHub goes down, you’re unable to check in code,” Middleton said. “Sometimes you’re unable to use their Copilot product on your desktop or even the agentic workflows they’ve expanded into.”

In addition to hampering developer workflows, Copilot downtime can also create downstream security risks, he said.

 “Their Copilot auto review is really good. On a pull request, when you push code, you say ‘Copilot please review my code and give me comments. Is this insecure? Is this a buffer overflow?’. If it cannot scan those things, you might miss those things,”  Middleton said. “The GitHub Advanced Security Suite is not cheap. We use it to make sure that our code stays secure and we don’t get hacked and leak people’s data.”

Part of that demand has come from GitHub internally, where, according to a presentation from the Build conference, Copilot was the first, second and third most prolific contributor to the GitHub codebase, with CLI contributing the most, followed by Coding Agent then Code Review.

“All these services at GitHub were built with the assumption that ‘we’ll have this number of commits per second, we’ll have this many [pull requests] per second, and maybe you’ve planned to double every year or something,” Middleton said. “But that’s not what happened. When agentic launched, within six months, we’re at like 200 times usage. So, [they’re] growing hundreds of times faster than they predicted. I don’t think there’s any way they could have planned for that.”

In April 2026, GitHub COO Kyle Daigle wrote in a post on X that GitHub is now processing roughly a billion commits a month, with no sign of slowing down. In 2025, that was a year’s worth of commits.

Ben Lutkevich is an award-winning technology writer and editor covering IT infrastructure, app development and AI.