Tell HN: Copilot For Business forcibly terminates Copilot Personal subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Copilot For Business forcibly terminates Copilot Personal subscriptions

36 pointsgavinray30 comments

My org recently enabled Copilot For Business.

I've had a personal subscription until this point.

Today, my Copilot plugin started throwing rate-limit errors. Upon checking my billing details, I notice I can no longer manage my subscription and that it's managed by my Org.

GitHub Support told me that my personal subscription was cancelled, with a pro-rated refund, because it's not possible to have both a personal and org subscription.

Now I have to wait for someone from the org to manually revoke my seat so I can re-purchase my own subscription.

Heads up for anyone else who finds themselves in this situation.

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Why would you prefer your own personal subscription over a business plan?

I just checked the offering today and was confused why the personal subscription is with $10 almost half of the business plan with $19. After some more browsing I found a page which claimed that a business plan had better privacy protection (e.g. your input is not used for training). So the business plan seems to be a tad better.

Some people qualify for a free personal subscription.

Some qualifications are based on GitHub contributions. If those are tired to the same account you use for work, you're out of luck.

GitHub encouraging and enabling using the same account for work (-for-hire) and personal (or work, but owned by yourself) might've been great for growth, but it's a risk managment minefield.

Because they want to use it for other stuff than their job?

Then do it on your personal account?

Apparently, they can't. Ive done the same sort of thing with software licenses - occasionally, something is so useful that I'm willing to maintain my own subscription. The full Jetbrains suite, for one.

I seem to recall Apple doing roughly the same thing with email accounts.

In that case it looks like they want to conduct personal/other business on company computer, which in itself is a no no.

Org manages spend limits and controls policies on how Copilot behaves.

If the org hits their spending limit, you're SOL.

I disagree with most of these posters. I am a person on GitHub. I don’t become a different person once the work day starts. I’ve done plenty of OSS as an employee of companies, and I’ve done more OSS work as an individual.

Although you _can_ use separate accounts, the idea that you MUST is nonsense.

But yes, I encountered the same thing once I was added to my full-time employer’s GHE Cloud account. So far, not a problem.

Lesson: Don’t conduct personal business with employer email.

Alternative lesson: don't conduct employment business with personal email.

Definitely a good idea! In this case I think it was a “personal” account on a work domain.

Why do you want a personal subscription instead of an org subscription? Isn’t it great the org pays and all input is not collected for the big AI?

Also, did you use the same github account for your personal projects as you did for job purposes?

An org can impose restrictions on CoPilot which then affect your personal account. See https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/managing-copilot/managing...

In my case I just created a new account to use with the org, so that I can control the settings on my personal account.

This is the reason.

Why wouldnt you have an account using that jobs credentials that is only for that work, and another for your personal stuff? Mixing that stuff is not good practice for many reasons.

Separate Github profiles for work and personal.

Is it normal for people to have separate profiles like that on Github?

Yes, of course. In fact it is a pretty bad idea to use the same profile for an employer. Always treat an employer as disposable, along with the respective GitHub username for it.

I would say most devs use same GitHub profile for work and personal projects. GitHub provides pretty easy way to join various organizations with same handle. It almost seems exception when a developer creates a new profile for work.

The practice can vary significantly by the employer. Some employers prefer the usernames be new and unique to the employer, whereas others don't care. It's obvious that it's a major liability for the employee to reuse the username for personal and professional organizations.

Yeah, exactly. Personally I always thought that was a better policy (to have separate profiles) but I've actually had senior devs in the org tell me to just use my personal one and add my work email to it, so that's what I did. Seemed strange to me but I didn't question it too much. Maybe I should've, lol.

Not normal enough. Would you do all your personal emailing on your work email? I don't know why so many people have a blind spot when it comes to GitHub

At $JOB, it's mandated to have a separate GitHub account

I certainly do - my work GitHub profile is attached to my work email address whereas my personal GitHub is attached to my personal email address.

it's a complete separation of responsibilities in the same way that I have a work laptop and a personal laptop.

Yes. My work GitHub account is via SSO using my work creds. My personal GitHub account is much older and uses my personal email address.

Of course, we can’t (or shouldn’t) be uploading any of our code to GitHub for work. We have self-hosted Bitbucket servers. The corporate GitHub accounts are strictly used for Copilot.

If/when I leave the company, I’m pretty sure they don’t want all the code tied to my personal account. That sounds like a nightmare. I don’t want that either.

Thanks all. You've convinced me. I'll set up a new profile for the next time I need to work with a company.

Why are you using your personal account for work?

_always_ and I mean _always_ have a separate github/gitlab account for work and private things, otherwise you risk getting a lawsuit of your (former) employers. Especially if your work contract assigns all intellectual property rights to the employer.

I don’t think I’d ever sign up for personal stuff with my work email. Those are two areas of my life I keep separate.

If you want a personal account and are willing to pay for it, sign up under a non-work account. Use that at home, and use your work account at work. This makes sense to me.

It's called domain claiming. Your org should have notified you, or asked that you migrated the email to your personal one.

That is truly awful customer service.

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