GitHub Copilot cloud sandboxes go generally available, with billing from November and a shared compute pool
GitHub has made its new connected GitHub Copilot cloud experience and the cloud sandboxes behind it generally available on paid Copilot plans, announcing the change on October 28, 2026 during GitHub Universe. Copilot sessions can now be started from github.com, GitHub Mobile, the Copilot CLI, the Copilot app, Visual Studio Code, Slack or Microsoft Teams and picked up again on any of the other surfaces, because the work itself runs in a GitHub-managed sandbox in the cloud rather than on the machine where the request was typed. The rollout began on October 28.
The launch comes with a billing change that matters as much as the feature. According to GitHub's changelog, the compute included with GitHub plans is now a single, dollar-based pool shared by standard GitHub-hosted Actions runners, Copilot cloud sandboxes and, on Team and Enterprise Cloud, larger hosted runners. GitHub also states that billing for cloud sandbox usage begins in November 2026. From that point, every hour a Copilot agent spends working in the cloud is metered against the same allowance that pays for continuous integration jobs.
For developers, the practical consequence is that Copilot's cloud agent stops being a separate, loosely metered feature and becomes a compute consumer that sits next to Actions in the monthly bill. For administrators, it means a new policy to configure, a new SKU to budget for and a shared pool that agent sessions and build pipelines will now compete for.
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WHAT THE CONNECTED COPILOT CLOUD EXPERIENCE CHANGES.
The core of the announcement is session continuity. GitHub describes a model in which every surface shows the same list of sessions, so a task can be started by voice on a phone, steered from VS Code and checked later on github.com without restarting the work when the developer switches clients. In the Universe announcement post, GitHub summarises the idea in one line: "The agent keeps working in the cloud."
Each session runs by default in a GitHub-managed, isolated cloud sandbox. GitHub's documentation describes this environment as an ephemeral Linux environment built on Azure Container Apps Sandboxes, with GitHub supplying the identity, policy and billing layer on top. The changelog says sandboxes have no one-hour limit on total running time, and that when a sandbox shuts down it saves a snapshot so the session can be resumed later. The documentation describes three session states: active, stopped (files, environment variables and in-progress work are snapshotted) and deleted (the environment and its snapshot are removed and cannot be recovered).
Inside the sandbox, cloud sessions get the same tool set as the Copilot CLI and the Copilot app, including Bash, the GitHub CLI and code search. Built-in connectors such as Sentry, Linear and Cloudflare, custom MCP servers, agent skills and slash commands can all be used to give the agent context. Permissions determine how much autonomy the agent has, and Copilot asks for approval before tool calls that require it.
The cloud is the default, not the only option. Developers can register a local machine as an environment, either through GitHub Mission Control for the CLI or VS Code or with the `--environment-host` flag in the CLI, and then steer those local sessions from GitHub Mobile. This matters for work that depends on local hardware, private networks or credentials that should not leave a developer's machine.
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WHO GETS ACCESS AND HOW ADMINISTRATORS CONTROL IT.
The new experience is limited to paid Copilot plans. Copilot Free users keep Copilot Chat on github.com and GitHub Mobile, and GitHub says they get the new cloud experience by upgrading. GitHub has also simplified onboarding for the Slack and Teams integrations as part of the same release.
In organizations, access is governed by the "Copilot in the cloud" policy in Copilot settings, and existing enterprise-managed permission settings and MCP allowlists apply to the new experience. GitHub's sandbox documentation adds that cloud sandboxing is disabled by default for organizations and enterprises until an owner enables the corresponding access policy, so members of a managed organization will not see sessions running in GitHub's cloud until an administrator opts in.
The data boundaries are also defined. Chat sessions are scoped to a single organization or to personal repositories by default, organization members need single sign-on to access session data from organization repositories, and Copilot is read-only in repositories where the user does not have write access. For companies that were cautious about agents acting across repositories, these defaults keep a cloud session inside the same permission model that already applies to people.
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HOW CLOUD SANDBOXES ARE METERED.
GitHub's billing documentation for Copilot sandboxes lists three meters. Compute and memory are charged per second while a session is running, measured "from the moment a session starts until it is stopped or deleted", and they are not metered while a sandbox is stopped. Storage covers the snapshots of stopped sessions and is metered from the moment the sandbox is stopped until it is deleted. Memory is charged on the amount "allocated to the session, not the memory actively in use."
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Meter | Unit | Price (USD) | Equivalent per hour |
Compute | Per compute second | $0.000024 | $0.0864 |
Memory | Per GiB-second allocated | $0.000003 | $0.0108 per GiB |
Snapshot storage | Per GiB-month | $0.005 | Not applicable |
Local sandboxing | Included in Copilot seat | No extra charge | Not applicable |
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Prices as listed on GitHub's official billing documentation on October 31, 2026. The per-hour column is Data Studios arithmetic from the published per-second rates. GitHub's documentation does not publish machine sizes, so the amount of memory allocated to a given session is not stated.
Local sandboxing is a different feature and is not billed separately. It runs Copilot's shell commands on the developer's own machine under operating-system restrictions on filesystem, network and system access, is available on macOS, Linux and recent Windows 11 builds, and is included in the standard Copilot seat at no additional cost. GitHub's documentation notes that it does not use a separate virtual machine or container, so it offers lighter isolation than the cloud sandbox.
Budgets work at two levels. A product-level budget caps all cloud sandbox spending, while a SKU-level budget caps a specific SKU such as "Sandbox Linux." With "Stop usage when budget limit is reached" enabled, additional usage is blocked at 100% of the budget and users in the affected scope see a banner. Cloud sandboxes are not part of the "Bundled AI credits" budget type, so a budget set on Copilot AI credits does not limit sandbox compute. In a repository, the repository owner is billed; outside a repository, `copilot --cloud` asks the user to choose which account or organization pays.
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FROM ACTIONS MINUTES TO A SHARED DOLLAR-BASED POOL.
GitHub's plan reference page still lists the included Actions allowance in minutes, which is how it has long been expressed. The updated Actions billing documentation expresses it as a monthly dollar amount that is shared by standard GitHub-hosted runners on private and internal repositories, cloud sandbox compute and memory, and larger runners on Team and Enterprise Cloud. GitHub states that "no eligible usage type has priority over another" when drawing from the pool.
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Plan | Included before (minutes per month) | Included now (USD per month) | Shared by |
GitHub Free | 2,000 | $12 | Standard runners, cloud sandboxes |
GitHub Pro | 3,000 | $18 | Standard runners, cloud sandboxes |
GitHub Free for organizations | 2,000 | $12 | Standard runners, cloud sandboxes |
GitHub Team | 3,000 | $18 | Standard runners, cloud sandboxes, larger runners |
GitHub Enterprise Cloud | 50,000 | $300 | Standard runners, cloud sandboxes, larger runners |
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Allowances as listed on GitHub's official documentation on October 31, 2026. GitHub's own guide figure is that $300 covers 50,000 minutes on a standard Linux runner at $0.006 per minute, and the same rate converts the other plans exactly: 2,000 minutes equal $12 and 3,000 minutes equal $18. The headline allowance therefore does not shrink for teams that only run standard Linux jobs. What changes is that the allowance is no longer reserved for CI, and that higher-rate compute, whether larger runners or long sandbox sessions, uses it up faster.
Some usage still does not touch the pool. Standard runners in public repositories and self-hosted runners remain free, while larger runners are billed even on public repositories. Copilot code review's runner cost draws from the same pool on private repositories and is free on public ones. The pool resets at the start of each billing cycle; once it is exhausted, usage is charged to the payment method on file, and without one, usage is blocked.
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WHAT A TYPICAL COPILOT CLOUD WORKLOAD COSTS.
Because GitHub does not publish sandbox machine sizes, any cost estimate depends on an assumption about allocated memory. The figures below assume a session with 4 GiB allocated, which is an illustrative value rather than a published configuration, and they exclude snapshot storage.
At the published rates, one hour of such a session costs $0.0864 for compute plus $0.0432 for memory, or about $0.13. A developer who keeps cloud sessions running for 40 hours in a month would consume about $5.18 of the allowance. On a GitHub Pro or Team allowance of $18, that leaves room for roughly 139 sandbox hours if nothing else draws on the pool; on GitHub Free or Free for organizations, the $12 allowance corresponds to about 93 hours, and the $300 Enterprise Cloud allowance to about 2,315 hours.
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Scenario (4 GiB allocated, storage excluded) | Arithmetic | Result |
One sandbox hour | $0.0864 + 4 × $0.0108 | About $0.13 |
40 sandbox hours in a month | 40 × $0.1296 | About $5.18 |
Team org using 2,000 Linux CI minutes | 2,000 × $0.006 | $12 of the $18 pool |
Sandbox hours left in that Team pool | $6 ÷ $0.1296 | About 46 hours |
10 GiB of snapshots kept for a month | 10 × $0.005 | $0.05 |
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The Team example shows where the shared pool will be felt. An organization that already consumes two-thirds of its allowance on CI will exhaust the remaining $6 after about 46 hours of agent time, after which both builds and agent sessions are billed at their normal rates. Larger allocations change the picture quickly: at 8 GiB, a sandbox hour costs about $0.17, and the same $18 pool covers roughly 104 hours. Stopped sessions, by contrast, are cheap to keep, since only snapshot storage is metered.
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WHAT DEVELOPERS AND ADMINISTRATORS SHOULD DO BEFORE NOVEMBER.
Individual developers on paid Copilot plans can start using cloud sessions now. GitHub's changelog says billing for sandbox usage begins in November 2026 without naming a day, so it is worth checking the billing settings for the account that will be charged, especially when sessions are started outside a repository and the CLI asks which owner should pay.
Organization owners face more decisions. The "Copilot in the cloud" and cloud sandbox access policies are the switches that determine whether members can run agent sessions on GitHub's infrastructure at all. Teams that rely on their included Actions allowance for CI should set a product-level or SKU-level budget for cloud sandboxes, because AI credit budgets do not cover sandbox compute. Repositories with heavy pipelines may also want to monitor how quickly the shared pool is consumed in the first billing cycle after November.
The cloud experience is one of several Copilot changes GitHub shipped at Universe. Data Studios has covered GitHub Enterprise's new Copilot access with no seat charge, Copilot Automations for shared team workflows, GitHub Agentic Workflows and Copilot Fusion's automatic model routing, all of which can run agent work in the cloud and therefore interact with the same compute and credit budgets.
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WHAT IS ESTABLISHED AND WHAT REMAINS UNCLEAR.
The established facts are the general availability of the connected cloud experience and cloud sandboxes on paid Copilot plans from October 28, the move to a shared, dollar-based compute allowance, the per-second sandbox rates published in GitHub's billing documentation, and GitHub's statement that sandbox billing begins in November 2026.
Several details are not yet documented. GitHub has not published sandbox machine sizes, so the memory allocated to a session, and therefore its real hourly cost, cannot be calculated precisely from public information. The exact start date of billing in November is not given. Parts of GitHub's documentation also still reflect the earlier preview: the sandbox billing page refers to a public preview and a $10 monthly entitlement available through the end of July 2026, and the CLI documentation still describes `copilot --cloud --experimental` as an experimental entry point. Until GitHub reconciles these pages with the general availability announcement, the changelog is the clearest statement of the current terms, and administrators should expect the published rates and limits to be refined as billing goes live.
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