GitHub Copilot's "Free Plan Limit" Bug: A Year-Long Oversight? (danielraffel.me)

GitHub Copilot free-tier users report a persistent bug where the UI shows “You’ve reached your free plan limit. Your limits will reset on [date],” but the promised reset never happens. Instead of restoring completions, the same lockout persists and the reset date simply advances by another month. Hundreds of users have documented the pattern on GitHub’s community forum for nearly a year: no usage is allowed after the supposed monthly quota is hit, waiting for the reset yields no change, and the service remains inaccessible until a manual intervention (if any) occurs. The issue matters because it undermines the reliability and trust of a publicly marketed free tier. Technically it points to a quota or billing-state problem — for example, a failed monthly rollover, a stale usage flag that isn’t cleared, or a scheduling/job error in the quota service — rather than intentional throttling. Because free users lack formal support channels, the bug appears to have been low priority and unresolved, which can push developers toward paid plans, waste time, and harm adoption. The practical ask: GitHub should either fix the quota reset mechanism or explicitly deprecate/clarify the free tier to avoid misleading users and restore confidence.