GitHub Copilot's 27x Billing Trap is Closing — The Budget Guard Deadline

GitHub Copilot is shifting to usage-based billing on June 1, 2026. If you've been relying on flat-rate pricing to shield you from the realities of AI coding costs, your runway just evaporated. We've been tracking a nasty trend in the wild: the "27x billing trap." When an AI coding assistant gets stuck in a recursive loop - hallucinating a fix, failing the test, and trying again - it burns tokens at maximum velocity. Under flat-rate billing, this was an invisible annoyance. Under usage-based billing, it's a catastrophic financial event.