Do Failed Prompts Consume Premium Request Allocation?

[TroyCoderBoy]

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Copilot Feature Area

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Because there are so many of them. This kind of problem happens in almost every chat thread.
Visual Studio 2022/2026 Copilot is in a disgraceful state right now.
How is it possible Github has not fixed these erroring out problem yet?

Oh, and please don't tell me to clear cache, logout and log back in and all that jazz. I've tried EVERYTHING.

[TroyCoderBoy]

Close visual studio, open it again. Close chat window open it again. Do a prompt. Get a semantic search error but the prompt manages to complete. Follow up with another prompt and...

[TroyCoderBoy]

Close visual studio.
Clear copilot cache,
Restart Visual Studio.
Retry prompt.

Life for developers is so much easier now with Copilot don't you think?

[davevad93]

Hi @TroyCoderBoy,

Yes, unfortunately failed requests consume your premium request allowance, as they are considered input tokens even if they fail.

This has also been discussed here: Premium requests are being counted even when Copilot fails due to server-side issues #252030

[TroyCoderBoy]

Some would call it theft.

[Aqib121201]

Yeah, failed prompts do still count against your premium allocation right now. The reason is that the request is sent and processed server side before it fails, so those input tokens are already consumed even if you never get a full response back. From the system’s point of view, it’s a completed transaction, even though you didn’t get a useful answer.

You can confirm this by checking your usage log you’ll see each failed request recorded the same way as a normal one. It’s frustrating, especially when the errors come from Copilot’s own backend and not your side.

There isn’t a user side workaround at the moment. The only real fix has to come from GitHub adjusting how they count failed or partial completions. It’s been raised a few times already, and the engineering team has acknowledged they’re looking at ways to better handle billing or retries for these cases.

For now, the best you can do is keep an eye on the Copilot status page before large sessions and retry prompts that fail right away, since those usually fail before using much of your token quota.

If this clarified what’s happening, please mark the answer as helpful so others understand the current behavior.