GitHub Copilot Code Review: Pricing, Limits and What the GitHub Copilot Review Agent Costs per Pull Request

How many code reviews does your plan actually buy?

Every guide to this feature explains how to click Request. None of them does the division, which is odd, because both numbers are published by GitHub and the answer is the whole budgeting question. Take the allowance, divide by 13, and you get the number of reviews a seat buys in a month.

Read the guaranteed column first. On the individual plans the allowance splits into base credits, which are fixed to the price of the plan, and flex credits, which are the variable half. The guaranteed figure is base only. It is the floor you can put in a budget without hoping.

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There is a caveat attached to every row and it is important: those counts assume the seat spends its entire allowance on code review and nothing else. Nobody does that. A Business seat that also runs Copilot chat, the coding agent and a few Spaces will get nowhere near 146 reviews, because all of it comes out of the same 1,900 credits. Treat the column as a ceiling, not a plan.

The seat prices themselves are broken down tier by tier on our GitHub Copilot pricing page, and the org-plan choice is worked through on GitHub Copilot Business.

The one limit that decides whether this feature fits your workflow

GitHub is unusually direct about it, and it sits in the middle of a documentation page most people skim: "Copilot always leaves a 'Comment' review, not an 'Approve' review or a 'Request changes' review. This means that Copilot's reviews do not count toward required approvals for the pull request, and Copilot's reviews will not block merging changes."

Read that as a product decision rather than a missing feature, because that is what it is. GitHub built an advisor, not a gate. It will tell you the error path is unhandled and it will offer you the three lines that handle it, and then it will get out of the way and let you merge anyway. Nothing about your branch protection changes when you turn it on. Your two-approver rule is still a two-approver rule, and the two approvers are still people.

That matters most for the pitch you are likely to hear internally, which is that an AI reviewer lets you drop a required reviewer and ship faster. It does not, and it cannot, because a Comment review is invisible to the approval count. What does gate a merge is a required status check: your tests, your linter, your security scan. Copilot sits beside those. If your goal is fewer bad merges, spend the effort on the status checks and treat Copilot as the thing that makes the human review shorter.

There is a smaller limit worth knowing before you design a process around it: the conversation is one way. Reply to a Copilot comment to argue with it and your colleagues will see the reply, but Copilot will not, and it will not answer. The only way to get a second opinion is to request a fresh review, which starts the 13-credit meter again. Our longer write-up on whether AI can review pull requests covers where that ceiling shows up across tools, not just this one.

How to enable automatic Copilot code review

The setup guides that circulate for this feature are mostly out of date, because they describe a toggle. It is a branch ruleset, which is why so many people go looking in Copilot settings and conclude the feature is missing from their account.

One number to keep in your head while you do this. A branch that takes six pushes to get through review costs one review with "Review new pushes" off and six with it on, which is 78 credits instead of 13. On a team of ten merging thirty branches a week, that switch is the difference between a comfortable allowance and an overage line on the invoice. The Lite and Balanced effort levels live in the same ruleset, and a repository setting overrides the organization default, so a security-sensitive service can run Balanced while everything else runs Lite.

Where we fit, and where Copilot beats us

We build a competing product, so read this part skeptically and take the losses first. Copilot code review is already inside the seat you pay for, which is a real advantage we cannot match on price. It is one ruleset away from covering every repository in your organization. It reviews from inside VS Code before a pull request exists. And GitHub owns the platform, so it will always be better wired into the pull request UI than anything bolted on from outside.

Agentcode answers a different question. A reviewer reads a diff and tells you what is wrong with it. Our agent takes the task, opens the branch, writes the change, runs your test suite and hands you the pull request. It never merges on its own, so your branch protection and your reviewers stay exactly as they are, and the human approval that Copilot cannot give is still given by a human. The bill is $29 a month, flat, with no credit balance draining in the background and no second meter on your Actions minutes.

Plenty of teams should run both, and they do not overlap much: one comments on work that already exists, the other produces the work. If you are mapping the whole category first, start from the best AI for coding, or put the seat prices side by side on AI coding tool pricing.

Keep researching

More on Copilot specifically: GitHub Copilot pricing, GitHub Copilot Business, Business against Enterprise, what GitHub AI credits are and is GitHub Copilot worth it.

Or widen the search with AI code review tools, GitHub Copilot against Claude Code, or how to review an AI pull request.