It can bill to our Azure sub and I don't have to go through the internal bureaucracy of purchasing a new product/service from a new vendor.
The number of intermediaries that some customers, especially governmental agencies, go through to get just an Azure bill can be wild...
(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_licensing_corruption... ) The upside: the EU finally got a prosecutor. And last but not least everybody forgot why the Baby Bells were born.
1. Go through a 1-2 month procurement process where I have to deal with not only the vendor's sales team on who I'm buying from but also probably multiple teams in my BigCorp. Vendor sales team wants to feel relevant and so I'm sitting in at least one meeting where I'm telling them I just want to buy your shit make it as fast as possible. But then the people in my BigCorp likely not only don't understand why the software is necessary, but need to feel relevant and as such will make me fight through bureaucratic hurdles. I have to get compliance involved. Finance involved. If there's a procurement team I have to get them involved. Probably there's a security questionnaire that my bigcorp's security team uses. I have to send that to the vendor's sales people. They have to send it to their security folks. Security folks on their end have to complete it and send it back. I have to send approvals up the chain on my end, after I've successfully convinced some clueless nontechnical user why software XYZ is important and no, the shit half baked thing we already have doesn't work.
OR alternatively:
2. I can go to the AWS marketplace, click a button, and now my AWS bill goes up X thousands of dollars per month and none of the bullshit from 1 is required. Because AWS is already an approved vendor. Everyone except perhaps someone monitoring the AWS bill for large increases is happy and doesn't care (well, maybe the security team does, but hopefully they aren't tattling on you to the procurement people who have nothing to do and want to stick their fingers in the process and we can make that process go quick), and I just need to tell that person that we are doing it.
It's not always the exact narrative I just laid out, but the gist of it is pretty much procurement at every bigcorp.
On wait, nevermind.
Usage limits are/were higher in Copilot. They also charge per prompt, not per token.
It is basically a token based pricing, but you get alos a limitation of prompts (you can't just randomly ask questions to models, you have to optimize to make them do the most work for e.g. hour(s) without you replying - or ask them to use the question tool).
The Qwen models are cool, but if you're coming from Opus you will be somewhere between mildly to very disappointed depending on the complexity of your work.
> The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero
The value add is the GitHub integration. By far the best.
GH has cloud agents that can be kicked off from VS Code; deeply integrated with GH and very easy to set up. You can apply enterprise policies on model access, MCP white lists, model behavior, etc. from GitHub enterprise and layered down to org and repo (multiple layers of controls for enterprises and teams). It aggregates and collects metrics across the org.
It also has tight integration with Codespaces which is pretty damn amazing. `gh codespace code` and it's an entire standalone full-stack that runs our entire app on a unique URL and GH credentials flow through into the Codespace so everything "just works". Basically full preview environments for the full application at a unique URL conveniently integrated into GH. But also a better alternative to git worktrees. This is a pretty killer runtime environment for agents because you can fully preview and work on multiple streams at once in totally isolated environments.
If you are a solo engineer, none of this is relevant and probably doesn't make sense (except Codespaces, which is pretty sweet in any case), but for orgs using the GH stack is a huge, huge value add because Microsoft is going to have a better understanding of enterprise controls.
If you want to understand the value add of Copilot, I think you need to spend a bit of time digging into the enterprise account featureset in GH, try Codespaces, try Copilot cloud agents. Then it clicks.
It doesn't matter how competent the actual model is, or how long it's able to operate independently, if the harness can't handle it and drops responses. Made me think are they even using their own harness?
At least Anthropic is obviously dogfooding on Claude Code which keeps it mostly functional.
It was great while it lasted.
If you need some random Egyptian government compliance certification for your vendors or whatever, Microsoft probably has that, Anthropic probably doesn't. Microsoft's (as well as Oracle's) entire deal these days is figuring out what customers care about compliance-wise, and structuring their offerings to deliver exactly that. Whether they're selling their own products, or re-selling somebody else who doesn't have that kind of global footprint and clout, is secondary at best.
Now, it may be the right call to immediately give up and shutdown after Opus 4.5, but models and subscriptions are in flux right now, so the right call is not at all obvious to me.
The agentic AI models could be commoditized, some model may excel in one area of SWE, while others are good for another area, local models may be at least good enough for 80%, and cloud usage could fall to 20%, etc. etc.
Staying in the market and providing multi-model and harness options (Claude and Codex usable in Copilot) is good for the market, even if you don't use it.
Over here in the EU, we need to store sensitive data in an EU server. Anthropic only offers US-hosted version of their models, while G-cloud and Azure has EU based servers.
For direct instance: Anthropic's Claude Code, despite being primarily written in Python, didn't even properly support Windows until far too recently (suggesting people use WSL instead) and even now is not a great Windows experience (requiring git bash, illuminating that among other things Claude's models themselves haven't trained enough on PowerShell, and I try to avoid Claude's models when working on PowerShell scripts still, personally).
Meanwhile VS Code works everywhere I want it to, out of the box, and VS Code's GitHub Copilot integration does the same.
Also, your "near zero" value add includes engineers at Microsoft/Github following the "which is the smartest/most practical model" meta-game for you and just silently updating defaults in Copilot for you without needing to make conscious choices. Sure, you can follow that meta yourself by watching HN every day and sampling hundreds or thousands of opinions across dozens to hundreds of stories each day, then play a "Netflix subscription game" of switching subscriptions every X months when the meta-game shifts or you can pay Microsoft to do all that research for you (which true also includes their professional business relationships/contracts with OpenAI and Anthropic, which is as much of a feature as a bug in my opinion because it's also a signal in the opinion war noise of choosing the "smartest model [for you, right now]" and does show up as its own HN stories for meta-debate). At least to me that's much more than a 0% or 1% value add, but maybe that's also because I don't trust either Anthropic or OpenAI directly, I sort of don't trust HN's comments as a strong guide to playing the meta-game, it's not a meta-game I want to play, and I'm happy to pay someone else to play it for me.
Just for context to the insanity, they allow recursive subagents to I believe its 5 levels deep.
You can make a prompt and tell copilot to dig through a code base, have one sub agent per file, and one Recursive subagent per function, to do some complex codebase wide audit. If you use Opus 4.7 to do this it consumes a grand total of 0.5% of a Pro+ plan.
Thats why this paragraph is here:
> it’s now common for a handful of requests to incur costs that exceed the plan price
This is about personal plans. Github Copilot is half the price of any competition I found.
It's just a decent deal for light users.
However, Claude changed their limits so I got to 100% very easily, and when I did hit 100%, I couldn't be given a "window" of snapshoting my work into something for another agent (either future claude window or GHCP agent) to easily pick up mid-work.
I found the lack of visibility into what costs what was very annoying. For $20/month, you get an arbitrary amount of usage that they were changing without notice or alerts or visuals. I didn't renew CC after it expired and just kept with GHCP.
Even with this announcement from GHCP, I haven't run into a limit. I'm considering upgrading to Pro+ if I don't see a limit.
But I stick with Sonnet more or less in both environments. I only used Opus for a couple of planning sessions at the very beginning, but JIT planning is done good enough by the more mid-tier models.
Time to consider buying hardware, I guess
I have always just used the API, but I decided to give copilot a go on the weekend because of the cheap price. And I am seeing weird behavior like I have never seen before... It will somehow fail to use the file editing tool and then spend an absolutely huge amount of time/tokens building a python script to apply the edit in a sub process... And it will spin it's wheels on stuff the API routinely just gets right in one shot.
Example zed issue https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/54219?issue=zed...
> Claude Code to be removed from Pro Tier? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
That's the only reason.
In many enterprises you'd need to be very lucky to get an approval for any service that doesn't come from MS.