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Comment by mhitza | Hacker News Reader

> Again, don't surprise the user. But that's an anathema to companies who want to hide tokens to dollars, the same way gambling companies obfuscate 'corporate bux' to USD.

This is the exact same thing that frustrates me with GitHub's AI rollout. Been trialing the new Copilot agent, and it's cost is fully opaque. Multiple references to "premium requests" that don't show up real-time in my dashboard, not clear how many I have in total/left, and when these premium requests are referenced in the UI they link to the documentation that also doesn't talk about limits (instead of linking to the associated billing dashboard).

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They don't make it easy to figure out but after researching it for my Co. this is what I came to.

    * One chat message -> one premium credit (most at 1 credit but some are less and some, like opus, are 10x)
    * Edit mode is the same as Ask/chat
    * One agent session (meaning you start a new agent chat) is one "request" so you can have multiple messages and they cost the credit cost of one chat message.

Microsoft's Copilot offerings are essentially a masterclass in cost opaqueness. Nothing in any offering is spelled out and they always seem to be just short of the expectation they are selling.

But how much is one premium request in real currency, and how many do I have per month?

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/manage-and-track-...

300 or 1500 per month depending on plan. $0.04 per premium request i believe.

You should see how Microsoft does the PowerBI/ Fabric billing. Gotta get premium capacity and licenses and regular capacity and it's so bad.

There's two costs to copilot coding agent, there's the 1 premium request plus there's the minutes the agent runs for comes out of your runner limits for the month.

This is coding agent, the asynchronous copilot, not the agent chatmode in copilot plugins for vscode etc

Highly recommend getting the $20/month OpenAI sub and letting copilot use that. Quality-wise I feel like I'm getting the same results but OAIs limits are a little more sane.

How do you link the openai sub to Gh copilot? I thought you needed to use OpenAI api

I'm talking about this new agent mode https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo... for which as far as I'm aware there's no option to switch the underlying model used.

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