Copilot cost and budget
What it costs, how to see it, and how to bound it.
Settings → AI Copilot → Usage shows what the Copilot has cost.
What is tracked
| Tokens | Input and output, per conversation |
| Cost | Estimated from the model's published pricing |
| By user | Who is spending |
| By feature | Chat, triage, post-mortems, code review, insights |
| Over time | Daily and monthly |
Costs are estimates from published per-token pricing, and newer models are flagged as such where the pricing is provisional. Treat them as a guide to relative spend rather than as an invoice.
Budgets
Set a monthly budget per organisation. As it is approached:
| Threshold | |
|---|---|
| Warning | Email to admins |
| Limit | Requests are refused, with a message saying why |
The refusal names the budget rather than failing opaquely — a Copilot that silently stops answering looks broken.
Where the cost actually goes
Usually not the chat.
| Feature | Cost driver |
|---|---|
| Code review | Every pull request, every push |
Auto-triage in shadow | Every candidate alert |
| Scheduled insights | Every run, whether or not anybody reads it |
| Knowledge crawling | Embeddings, but only for changed pages |
Reducing it
- Turn off scheduled insights nobody reads. The most common saving.
- Narrow code review to repositories where it earns its cost.
- Move triage out of
shadowonce you have decided — either enablegateor turn it off. Shadow mode that runs indefinitely is paying for a verdict nobody acts on. - Crawl fewer documentation sites. Content-hash diffing already keeps this small; the initial crawl is the expensive part.
Choosing a model
The most capable model is the default, and for incident work that is the right default — a wrong answer during an incident costs far more than the token difference.
For high-volume automatic uses, a smaller model is often the better trade. The model is configurable per feature.
Related
Where this behaviour lives: backend/internal/integration/copilot_client.go, frontend/src/app/settings/. If the code and this page disagree, the code is right — please fix the page.
Part of Copilot — The assistant that can read your monitoring data and act on it.