GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
github.blog
github.blog
Their "API pricing" is exactly the same as that of providers: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...
Seems a massive loss for Microsoft. Presumably there's a further rugpull to come.
How would that be? They are already charging as much as the underlying providers. They can hardly expect to have any customers if they are charging more.
Many of these enterprises are grid-locked with the IT department and AI usage.
We are paying for tens of thousands of those machines, although everyone knows they are stupidly expensive and incredibly slow.
The deal is really pretty much garbage now and I believe that is the intent.
$10 a month for auto-complete on a good UX is good value IMHO.
Tbh I think it still works, but only because the new allowance will likely get used very quickly within a billing cycle - I'm expecting this change to increase our orgs bill significantly based on how many API credits with open router I consume in a weekend using a single agent in a pairing style.
The pooling will only be useful if you have a bunch of infrequent/low usage users that you still want to have licenses.
I uninstalled copilot plugin because it was eating memory and its completions where about 60% good and the rest was bad.
After switching back to IntelliJ I see just positives.
We're putting other providers through the gauntlet. An M4 Studio or two running the latest Qwen3 or whatever counts for state of the art in open models is also looking a little more viable all the time.
Having some open weight deployment or vendor is also a good thing, because you may have domain specific tasks where you can get better results on domain specific problems with a quick finetune.
Unsloth makes it particularly easy. Open weight LLMs are incredibly powerful building blocks.
I think VSCode only supports copilot for "autocomplete" too
on top of that, you need GitHub Copilot for the PR reviewer functionality in GitHub
I do like the integrations with the IDE however, they are convenient for rapidly reviewing changes. I just need their terminals to actually work!
Here's the oh-my-posh GH issue[0] in case your problem is similar but not solvable with a simple package update.
[0]: https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh/issues/7029
but surely the issue is on VS Code side, to do things in a way that work with people's shells as they are
other agent harnesses don't have the same problems with my shell
The only sad thing is trying to use tools in a VS developer prompt (and how could this not have been fixed ages ago, its literall YOUR OWN flagship product). It knows how to launch the .cmd for it, but thats incredibly slow for single commands. Would be nice if I could tell it to just use an open terminal.
And yes, I need to find a solution for autocomplete. It used to be available in free tier of Copilot. Not sure anymore.
(No affiliation, they're my next stop when my trial of copilot runs out).
PS: i would have loved if I can directly buy $10 in credits and be free to spend it as quickly or as leisurly as I want -- without any monthly expiry or fixed recurring payments
Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.
Does it effectively bypass regional restrictions for you, so you can use something like the Claude API from unsupported regions such as Hong Kong, or does it still enforce the official providers' geo-restrictions?
You can pay with crypto though, which seems to be convenient for people under sanctions or with limited access, or if you are in low-tax jurisdiction (e.g. HK)
That said I think few people using openrouter are actually being selective about providers.
It took half a day to get my opencode setup, was not friendly. A lot of manually cross referencing model and providers. I was actually mainly optimizing for relatively fast providers. It all is super fragile and I'm sure half out of date; I have no idea if these picks are still fast, no promises they are still the same price (pretty terrifying honestly).
I'm mostly on coding plans so it doesn't super affect me. But man is it a bother to maintain.
And while i do not spend 200$ privat, in my startup we discussed this and our current mental model is, that instead of hiring someone new, we prefer to have more money for tokens.
This is easier for us and has a bigger benefit. The cost of a new / first employee is very high, a 200$ subscription is not. Upgrading that to lets say 400 or 800$ is still alot easier and if i can run multiply and better agents with that money, lets goooo.
And Gemma 4 and other open models can easily be hosted even for schools.
Another reason to hate that word.
From a different perspective, you were granted an incredible gift from the companies who let you use their product on their dime. Hopefully you made the most of it when you had the opportunity.
Okay then this AI stuff isn’t an example of that even under your definition.
I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.
Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code? Otherwise to pay 5.5% on all your tokens just so it's slightly easier to swap providers (ie. changing a few urls?)
Yep, you can plug deepseek/kimi/minimax into claude code just fine. Or run everything through another harness like opencode instead.
Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.
Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.
> billing
Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.
> reliability
They increase reliability?
> middleware
Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.
I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.
> Apple still charges 30%.
3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.
For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.
A single point of access with a single key for all of these things is a worthwhile convenience.
Still worth it IMO to be able to switch from Provider A to Provider B if Provider A is having a bad day.
I had copilot mainly so I could write issues and throw agents at it, while I went off and did other things. Has been great for contained spot work.
At this point, I'll go ahead and leave it expire, and then consolidate between Codex and JetBrains AI. Especially since Xcode supports Codex with a first-party integration.
The only model I even used on Copilot was Sonnet and now its got a ridiculous multiplier.
At this point they might as well just charge per Million tokens like every other provider instead of having a subscription.
Pretty sure that's what they will eventually do
Provide cheap and unlimited access to Grok for programmers (hence the Cursor partnership/purchase for distribution).
-> This would drag massive revenue right before the IPO announcement, like if the company is super growing
-> At a loss, but don't worry, we need these funds to build the biggest datacenter of the universe.
This announcement would create enough momentum to increase valuation, and because of the merge of his companies, would save his X/Twitter investors from a tragedy.
-> Would also be a great service to Cursor investors and so, who are stuck with their VSCode fork
One theory I think Matt Levine posited, is that SpaceX will go public with dual-class stock that gives Elon control even with a minority ownership stake, and will subsequently buy Tesla, which doesn't have dual class stock, making SpaceX the singular "Elon Musk company", with him having operational control despite being public.
But they can't buy curser before their IPO so thats that?
Perhaps they have to much compute because Musk overpromised and Twittergroq doesn't need that much compute after he nerved the porn stuff?
If anything, these new multipliers are more transparent than anything OpenAI or Anthropic have communicated regarding actual costs and give us a more realistic understanding of what it's costing these providers.
The fact that we were able to get such a substantial amount of usage for $20/$100/$200 a month was never meant to last and to think otherwise was perhaps a bit naive.
This feels like a strategy from the ZIRP era of tech growth where companies burned investor capital and gave away their products and services for free (or subsidized them heavily) in order to prioritize user acquisition initially. Then once they'd gained enough traction and stickiness they'd then implement a monetization strategy to capitalize on said user base.
There's going to be a limit to how much they can raise prices, because someone can always build out a datacenter and fill it up with open source DeepSeek inference and undercut your prices by 10x while still making a very good ROI--and that's a business model right there. Right now I'm sure there's a lot of people who will protest that they couldn't do their jobs with lesser models, but as time goes on that will get less and less. Already right now the consumers who are using AI for writing presentations, cooking recipe generation and ELI5 answers for common things, aren't going to be missing much from a lesser model. That'll actually only start to get cheaper over time.
Also for business needs, as AI inference costs escalate there comes a point where businesses rediscover human intelligence again, and start hiring/training people to do more work to use lesser models--if that is more productive in the end than shelling out large amounts of cash for inference on the latest models. [Although given how much companies waste on AWS, there's a lot of tolerance for overspending in corporations...]
Now, I have this high-resolution shiny object that can near instantaneously get any information I want along with _streaming HD video to it_ *anywhere*.
15 years even feels like a stone age. I can't fathom what it has to feel like people in their 60s and 70s.
That's very close to a normal day in 1996. The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper. The news was not any more interesting or informative because of that. I guess I can also still do the loop reasonably well, but I'm a lot slower than I was in 1996 when I was a cross-country state champion.
My parents are closing in on 70 and I guess I can't speak for them, but I'm at least aware of the daily routines of their lives, too. Walk the dog, do housework, DIY building projects, visit kids and grankids. Seems much the same, too, with the biggest difference being they're now teaching my sister's sons to play baseball rather than me, but shit, one of her sons even looks like exactly the same way I looked when I was 7! The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Housework meant no laundry machine, no dishwasher, and possibly no vacuum cleaner. That means hand washing everything, and beating rugs with sticks and brushes to get the dust off of them.
I look at the life my kids live, and it's not so different to my childhood. The toys are similar, their housing is similar. Probably the biggest difference is the availability of content on demand rather than much more fixed TV schedules.
The big difference in the last 30 years hasn't so much been in the kind of middle class life you can live, but the number of people who live that kind of life. In the 90s 40% of people globally were living in extreme poverty. Now its under 10%. The kinds of lives the middle class live in China and Vietnam are closer to those of Europeans today, when even 30 years ago most people in those countries were living much closer to the way your dad grew up.
I wonder if AI will result in a step change of living standards? Perhaps along with robotics we'll finally get to do nothing at all at home? I'm not convinced it'll be quick though. Maybe another 30 years.
I am just over 50 myself and I agree with your points. Technology has changed but life is largely very similar to wear it was in the 90s. At least day to day. Attitudes are way worse now.
I always wonder the views of older people. My parents are very technology forward and have been my entire life so it is difficult to gauge how different life is compared to when they were growing up.
It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!" and see as distinct from having 'unlimited' resources and the internet.
Your insight is good ("The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper") that life sort of stays the same but the modality changes. People still go to the store like they did in the mid-1800s but now it is by car.
I wonder what our "industrial revolution" will be where the previous generation lived (ie: out in the country on a farm) totally different lives to the current (ie: in the city in a factory). Maybe when space travel and multi-planetary living is normalized?
Since I was there (young, but there), I want to point out that this crosses three eras which all felt quite different:
1978: typed programs in from a magazine or loaded from a cassette (16kB, TRS-80)
1983: loaded programs from a floppy (64kB, Apple ][ and C64 etc)
1988: loaded programs from a hard disk (640kB, IBM PC and Mac).
But - now they are easier - I can read books on an e-ink screen and pretty much instantly find what I want to read next. I get my news on a phone. I used to watch TV/movies broadcast or on tape rentals. Now, I have just about everything I could ever want available - without ADs... those were such a time-waster.
What has changed is that I have access to MORE information than my local (or school) libraries could ever provide - in a variety of more accessible formats. Whatever tools I need to get "work done", I can find a myriad of free and open-source options.
But - the overall days and household family routines are the same - now, instead of reading a paper book while waiting to pickup my kids (or other family members) "back-in-the-day", I can read my device, or connect with my DIY communities online on my phone - or learn something new. I don't have to schedule life around major broadcast events, I can easily do many tasks while I am "out-and-about".
Friction has been reduced.
And at some point even frontier model costs will hopefully come down (if there is still a meaningful difference between closed and open source models at that point) as all of the compute that's being built out right now comes online.
Not sure how it all works out. Currently trillion dollar companies can't make a native app for platforms. Everything is just JS/Electron because economics does not work for them.
And here companies can make GW data center running very expensive GPUs for 1/10th of current prices. Sound little fanciful to me.
It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.
That would be, even is, the smart thing to do.
In other words.
The bubble has burst. You're just in denial.
If/when it gets to the point where it can replace a skilled worker, the service can be sold for close to the same price as that skilled labour. But the AI can run 24/7, reliably, and scale up/down at a moments notice.
There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best.
Even if SOTA models in the cloud are a few percentage points better, most work can be routed to local models most of the time. That leaves the cloud providers fighting over the most computationally intensive tasks. In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first.
(Unless providers can figure out a network effect that local models can't replicate).
Why? There's an inherent efficiency advantage to scale, while the only real advantage for local models (privacy/secrecy) hasn't proven convincing for broader IT either.
Maybe in a world where these AI companies behaved with some semblance of ethics and user-friendliness they would be on even ground, but for anyone paying attention local models are obviously the future.
Even with overhead and scaling for peak use and a large profit margin, any company with an ounce of competition will be vastly cheaper than self-hosting. And for models you can run yourself, there will be plenty of competition.
Price is a reason to escape many proprietary models, but not so much a reason to self host. Buying an expensive GPU mostly for AI purposes is not likely to save money unless you load it all day long.
Because of nonexistent regulation. Just wait for it…
The legal situation in for example the EU is crystal clear, only that it will take some time to go though all court instances.
The reason local models hasn't caught on is several fold. It's marketing to say your company follows the latest trend, and there's an inherent pressure to keep AI companies afloat so the economy doesn't entirely collapse. The other is, it wasn't until the last month that these models have caught up to frontier models. They just did, and they are more efficient and don't require a team of 500 to deploy.
Why on earth would that happen when everything else is moving into the cloud to tie it to ever-escalating subscription fees and prevent piracy?
Even with gaming, where running high-end 3D games in the cloud seems like madness and inevitably degrades the quality of the experience, they won't stop trying.
Based on what exactly? So far every time OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever has released a new top performing model, competitors have caught up quickly. Open source models have greatly improved as well.
I expect AI to be just like cloud computing in general - AWS, Azure, GCP being the main providers, with dozens of smaller competitors offering similar services as well.
I think the future of ai will be breakthroughs that let it run on commodity hardware, and the average person will not be paying for it from the cloud unless they want to be surveilled or are stuck on older hardware.
Right now I am running about what was a frontier model 1-2 years ago on a junk machine. Some people are running what was a frontier model 4 months ago on PCs and laptops that cost 5,000. In a year I think the landscape will be even better.
Yes, a lot of people (not me). Why? Well because that was the whole value proposition of these companies, relentlessly pushed by their PR and most of the media- rememmber it was something something Pocket PhDs, massive unemployment etc?
Considering most of the cost of producing a model is the upfront cost rather than the running one, I kinda still do.
The point was never to produce 4 frontier models per company a year.
Deepseek API pricing is very low compared to Anthropic/OpenAI API pricing.
For many, the 300% difference in pricing may be difficult to justify, if the quality difference is very small. And there will be many tasks where the most expensive/the best model, is not needed. Currently many people end up using Opus 4.7/GPT 5.5 for many tasks without thinking about it.
Unlike the us chinas focus is on research and sustainable building. China also has really good infrastructure for energy, etc. it is also to their advantage to drop 5 billion instead of 2 trillion and beat the us while turning a profit.
Chinas focus in ai is less flashy and because they are the biggest manufacturing super power in the world right now, it directly feeds their economy. They aren't looking for applications or to replace thought workers with slop bots, they have natural needs for this technology. Us manufacturers can't compete so they have to keep companies from selling their goods there see byd. China sees it as commoditizing their complement, the us is risking its entire economy and it's environment and resources, kind of scary.
I am not shilling China, this is just what is happening right now.
I think the Chinese government works differently than the US government. I think China has been subsidizing their electricity grid for decades and leading the world on sustainable electricity namely solar. While the us has let their infrastructure rot and laughed at government inefficiencies for about half that time. The US has data centers running on gas right now while waging wars blowing up gas infrastructure world wide. It would be comical if it wasn't an environmental disaster. Most of them have no hopes at even getting enough power in well established areas short term.
I realize what I am saying may come off as propaganda because the US holds net negative views on China so here are some links.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/10/1119941/china-en...
https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-ga...
I think because openai spent so much money upfront showing how it was possible to do this and laid out a product roadmap China got to get on board much cheaper and easier. I see no reason to not believe any of these companies when they say they didn't squander tons of money to do what they did because I don't know how openai has even spent all the money they have it's actually ridiculous to think about.
https://the-decoder.com/openai-adds-111-billion-to-its-cash-...
There are providers in the US who are offering Deepseek API for the same price. Is the Chinese govt. subsidizing those people too?
I see statements like this as strong indicators that the sales people are wrapping up their work and the accountants are taking over. The land rush is switching to an operational efficiency play.
Now they just increase the price to buy it back
Second, you have no idea what their costs are. It is most likely that they are simply passing on their costs to you. If that was not the setup, users would just go to another service provider who was providing tokens at a cheaper rate. It's not like there is a dearth of competitors in this business.
OpenRouter is guaranteed to be about the highest margin operator in the business right now. Everyone wishes they'd be them, skimming 5% off as the middleman without any OpEx.
They also show headline prices for the cheapest provider of whatever model, but then need to hit different backends some of which may be more expensive. For now they absorb those costs, but the VCs always come knocking.
Just my opinion though. Totally agreed that they have one of the best positions amongst all AI providers from a financial standpoint.
They do?? I was under the impression I was just playing the price for whatever provider they deemed 'best' for each completion.
Checking now: The way they describe it in their FAQ is that if the price changes, then they will bill you the new price. But I read that as regarding if the primary model provider changes their headline token cost; not in the case of pricing differences for models that have many different backends that host them.
Regardless, I would be more concerned about the streaming costs if the service continues to blow up and they scale aggressively through VC investments. If their 5.5% skim accounted for what they needed, you'd think they could effectively grow organically..
The 5% fee probably has to factor in Stripe's fees, which would be around 3% to 4% depending on whether it's an international card.
Also, the multiplier of 27 for Claude Opus 4.6/4. is way higher than the increase in API price would suggest.
I wonder why that is.
That is not my experience. Each model since at least GPT-4 can fill up an entire context window. In fact, more powerful models can solve tasks faster, so their ratio of multiplier to API price should decrease, not increase.
For example, Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a multiplier of 9 and an API price of $15, which is 0.6 multiplier per dollar.
Claude Opus 4.7 has an API price of $25, so it should have a multiplier of 25 * 0.6 = 15 when extrapolating from Sonnet, but the multiplier is 27.
> Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.
That might be it. Is there any data on this somewhere?
Anecdata: for me, this is exactly the case with Opus. It _really_ thinks, looks into more sources, more of the codebase, etc. Sonnet is 80% thorough, but Opus can go the extra mile and burns a ton of tokens doing so.
It's a convenience cost, for sure, but it's not valueless in a fast-moving world. Certainly if you're comfortable with one provider and it's cheaper, do that.
In not-too-distant future we're going to be running better models on our phones than we can buy access to today in the cloud. Skate where the puck is going: soak the customers until that day comes.
Still, the models will only get smarter and more efficient as the hardware gets cheaper. The timeframe may be debatable but the outcome really isn't.
(I know openrouter is not open, but it allows competition and should be easily replaceable if needed)
That GPT4-mini change is going to be brutal! Its much better than 5-mini, which was itself much better than earlier free models.
If there's no discount on credits (in terms of tokens per dollar) over other providers, I'm going to switch to a PAYG provider. If there's a month where there's little to no coding I can pocket the 10$. What incentive do they give to stay with this plan?
Or if you're a business with multiple seats, these plans may be more inefficient than raw API usage billing. Since if anyone at your organization fails to utilize their full $19/39 allotment each month, that's wasting money, whereas with API credits it is 100% utilized.
I don't think they've thought through the implications of this. Everyone should cancel and go usage-based billing with caps.
I'm guessing they did that (and the 'temporary bonus credits') to make the pill easier to swallow for that side of customers.
It still does make one wonder, why have seats at all though? If everyone is just in one big API credit pool - what do the seats/users accomplish?
That said it's worth noting, I don't see how anything they expose will reliably help orgs plan costing from what AFAIK is in fact a big shift for billing/costing planning.
> It forces you to pay at least $20
For better or worse that's public pricing, i.e. if you are coming in also negotiating VS for devs, windows/office licenses for the rest of the business and stuff like Azure Devops... a lot of their stuff gets cheaper if your company's IT procurement group is vaguely competent at negotiating. Not even talking bigcorp here I'm talking 500-1000 employee range.
Of course, very small orgs will suffer, but it does tie in with the theme over the last two weeks; anyone with a personal account is basically subsidizing the credits for the business accounts during the transition period.
Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot.
"To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare."
Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.
Also, Opus 4.7 seems like a model more intended to save Anthropic money than push the bar.
Don't think I'll be renewing though. The usage limits are low enough that I don't think this is worth it. One complex prompt while Americans are awake will wipe out your alloted tokens it seems.
How so? By all accounts I've read so far it uses more tokens overall for roughly the same results.
One provider who was undercutting the market with non-standard billing model moving to a more standard billing and prices doesn't seem like that strong of a signal, other than that Copilot was underpriced.
I don't disagree with your other points though.
If they wanted to limit what a request can do via their harness, I'm sure they artificially could.
I hate all of the other plans I've seen of here a "credit" or here's a "bucket of usage", and we pull an announced amount from it based on arbitrary info that can't be audited or proven, and most of shat is spent might be entirely useless anyway.
Claude Code has a problem where 1 request could take a significant portion of your 5 hour window, and it's unclear why.
It's much like SEO, where Google sometimes says things that might help, but it's just magic wand eaving hoping something works.
Will always be grateful for the greed of trillion dollar corporations that subsidized me.
Inconsistent design patterns from page to page, half baked features, inconsistent documentation (but BOY is there ever a lot of it!), NIH ui component libraries that don't act like you'd expect. All that fun stuff.
It's like they speedran the worst parts of enterprise apps.
Like PCC building empty cities, numbers go up I guess.
What a world. I want something else entirely but lots of people seem to be fine with this model.
Not really sure why I would stick with Copilot after this, and increasing Sonnet from 1x to 9x for annual subscribers is highway fucking robbery. Very glad I didn't commit myself to an annual plan.
Sometimes the multiplier increase is significant like for Claude Opus 4.6 from 3x to 27x (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...), meaning using that model will use up a lot more „tokens“ (whatever the new word for it is)
I don’t understand if this means they’re providing actual refunds or not. For them to straight up go back on their word this had to have been a major cost they didn’t exactly expect.
Save us Deepseek!
I don’t need the world’s greatest programmer for the types of vibe coding projects I actually build.
However, if compute keeps going up in cost, hiring skilled people who know how to utilize it becomes more important. This might save the tech economy.
I would say its a x1000 increase in price for agentic workflows.
I was using 100M+ tokens per day, $250 per day or so and only paying $160 per month to GitHub.
I cancelled my GHCP sub and switched to Codex last week, so far so good but I miss Gemini 3.1 Pro for UI work.
Should we be blamed about uber destroying the taxi business, or airbnb the hotel one? Oh sorry, "disrupting".
Uber was dirt cheap, now it is the same price as taxis, and the people working for it (the "partners", not employees) have no social benefits.
Airbnb was cheap and humane, now it is THE cause for housing crises and massive residential property "investment".
The playbook of silicon valley is destructive, not disruptive.
It is by design aimed towards wealth accumulation. The ones with most money can capture the market, and make even more. It really is late stage capitalism.
And the more wealth inequality there is, the more pain, poverty and instability will be as well. AI will only exacerbate this.
If people wouldn't use their services, nothing would happen. They would just go bankrupt.
So yeah, I'd say it's entirely people's fault. Because people just wanted to use their services without thinking what they're causing.
Customers who think only about themselves and noone else.
This is the role of legislation, educated experts creating policies so that you don't have to do business analysis before making a purchase.
Would I pay 10x the price for tokens and be outcompeted by other companies, hoping that openAI will go out of business ? This is entirely unrealistic.
Even if we argue that we can't require from every human being to understand what they're doing, I'd still argue that there are more people who perfectly understand it and don't care than people who have no idea how such a business operates.
> You cannot expect every consumer to be fully educated and aware of the consequences of their purchasing power.
Huh? I cannot expect that people understand consequences of their actions? What are we, animals? Of course sometimes things aren't simple, and we cannot predict that using some service will create some longterm effects that in the end will be harmful. Some things are hard to predict.
But some things are easy to predict and my point is that this was exactly this case.
I mean, now we all know what Uber and AirBnb did, and we still use them because we don't care (generally speaking, I've used uber maybe 3 times in my life, AirBnb never).
I do NOT want to have to research the business model of companies before I buy their products or services. I would like to outsource that to the government, and spend my time actually enjoying life.
Am I supposed to be invested in every change that happens around me ?
What if I am a baker, using chatGPT to experiment with recipes and develop them. Am I supposed to read about LLMs, tokens, and the silicon valley playbook ?
No. I should not have to do any of those things.
If a company will advertise that they can take your oil and "dispose it legally", and then on their website they will openly write that they've found a loophole allowing them to store oil on the bottom of the ocean, then you say it's morally OK to use their services because it's legal?
If todays legislations are cargo and are being bought and sold based on the number of hired lobbyists, then you say it's OK to base our moral compas on that?
If you're a baker then you need to figure out how LLMs work at least to a level so that you could say that you've tried to figure it out, just as when I'm a software developer and I need to figure out how kidney stones work, because it might be in my own personal interest to know this.
Same thing is when buying stuff from Chinese vendors that ship cheap stuff to every corner of the world. You can buy their cheap products using your blind excuses, but then don't blame your local markets that for some unknown and unpredictable reason they closed operation.
We have brains for a reason, and we need to use this organ to fight our way through the complexity. This is the tax every one of us has to pay for being human and to live in a human world. If you want to have a brain, but decide not to use it, then I think you're just being lazy and entitled.
Sure, enshitification is my fault because I do not read the fine print, or research business models before I buy stuff.
I am not saying that the consumer has no ethical responsibilities, I am saying that is infeasible for the average consumer to do so.
> If you're a baker then you need to figure out how LLMs work
I completely disagree. I should not have to research about which types of grain are destructive to the farming industry before buying bread.
> If you want to have a brain, but decide not to use it, then I think you're just being lazy and entitled.
I have the right to choose where I spend my brain power on, and there are much, much more interesting and gratifying things to me than trying to analyse the behaviours of megacorps in order to have a fully educated decision in everything, in the this hyper complex and hyperconnected world we live in.
We disagree completely, no reason to keep repeating the same arguments. Have a nice day and enjoy reading the fine print in everything you buy, if it makes you feel better.
Kind of yes. You use it, you buy it. You create demand. And if there's demand, there's supply, economics 1-2-3. You vote "YES" with your wallet.
I read the fine print, and this allows me to NOT use Opus x30 only because it's available. I choose to not use AirBnb. I send a signal that this supply is not in demand.
And I guess because people like me read fine prints, you can feel better as well, because if something big will come up, you will hear internet rants about it, because we analyze and resist.
When was this ever different? And do you expect it to ever change?
this is the project that I am working on https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz
When using opencode or copilot CLI, the error messages are displayed normally and it's possible to see what's going on. Under Pi, it sometimes just hangs, or Pi crashes with some bun stacktrace and that's it.
Copilot has introduced additional limits for Claude models in past month, and it's rather easy to hit it. Pi often doesn't show anything when this limit hits (although sometimes it shows the error, I guess it depends on Pi version).
but now, you get literally nothing
I created a 4 subagents that polled for new tasks, and restart after ~5h.
It was a great run.
Isn't this like saying "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo is now a Honda. But the price hasn't changed!"
* with a quota of 138 meters per hour, overage charges may apply
The old plans were $0.033/request for Pro, $0.026/request for Pro+ and $0.04/request for pay-as-you-go. That discount is now gone. They even still advertise "5x the number of requests" for Pro+ over Pro.
However I do also pay for milage (KM), and extending the rental period does often* NOT extend the milage range. Eg 1 month=1000 KM, 2 months=1000 KM, so you need to split the rental periods yourself and do all that hassle, or pay extra.
(*May of course vary depending on the rental company)
This being in Brazil.
I thought I was pretty familiar with available options, but no one in my circles ever mentions this product. It doesn’t seem to have much mindshare.
Has anyone used it? What’s your experience?
Personally I got CLI fatigue and am happy with Conductor for now, but things are moving fast in this space.
But its a really good UI for agentic coding. Not sure why more people don't use it. I've tried the others and keep coming back to Copilot chat. It's a really good tool. Which is why the rugpull on pricing is so concerning.
I use Claude Code, but I kept my Copilot subscription around mostly for really cheap usage of other models when I need to try a different one (which appears to be ending, in a sense) and also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files, I could make changes in one file and then just tab through some others.
I wonder what other good autocomplete is out there.
I am in the same boat. I tried looking for tab/auto-complete implementations ~ a year ago and it was pretty disappointing. If that has changed, would love to know!
It's a lot of stuff that makes me have to type less into the prompt, since it's already getting so much info from my editor
The list is not long but there are quite a few options. Even Grok has its own CLI!
The reality is, even though a CLI prompt looks very simple, it's a very complex piece of software. I personally use Claude Code (with GLM) and anything else I have tried was significantly inferior (with the exception of opencode).
I’ve “vibe-coded” some projects and when I start to find issues or go to refactor them I don’t have that memory of why decisions were made, because many decisions were never made.
Which feels a bit like a kick in the pants for me as a developer that was primarily using Copilot for VS Code ghost text and very rarely used the Chat sidebar much less "agentic" tools.
Copilot Pro sort of made sense for my personal account when amortized across a year, but I don't want to "waste" $10/month on credits I won't use most months.
What's actually better in the CLI?
i've been trying to do this with systemd-nspawn
I run it natively on my rocky8 container with UI sometimes but usually just do ssh
I prefer it because I can look at the code (although not as often anymore) and config (very often!) easily.
It also lets me jump to previous conversations easily.
There are a few cases where the CLI makes sense. One big one is if you are running multiple simultaneous sessions on a remote server using Tmux to have them preconfigured when you reconnect is nice.
Bun in general I don't see the benefit either.
I do that when I want to, but for me using agents in IDE is like looking with one eye covered.
Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now
https://bradygaster.github.io/squad/
If I have the same repo also open in VSCode, it’s also aware of that fact, so you can give it context (a file or selected lines of code).
The main one is I'd rather review the limited changes of a one shot prompt than ton of changes made by an agent.
Another being the massive use of tokens agents force you into. As the context window fills up, the quality goes down, and the token usage spikes as the model traps itself into low confidence reasoning loops.
Agents ain't it.
Usage paying for AI is 1000x crazier because you're not even getting a guarantee in the thing you pay for in the end. You have to keep feeding it prompts and hope it gives you the solution you want. You may end up with no expected result yet you are paying for it. At least with texting, you got what you paid for.
I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise.
I don't mind a PAYG model for a simple chat interface. But when it comes to actually producing things, you burn through TONS of tokens creating the wrong output.
That's already the case if you can self-host an LLM; you don't even need a mythical H200: gamer-grade GeForce cards can get you a long way there (if this page is to be believed: https://www.runpod.io/gpu-compare/rtx-5090-vs-h200 )
...after RAM prices return to normalcy, of course - and then wait another 2 or 3 generations of GPU development for a 96GB HBM card to hit the streets - and also assuming SotA or cloud-only LLMs don't experience lifestyle-inflation, but I assume they must, because OpenAI/Anthropic/Etc's business-model depends on people paying them to access them, so it's in their interests to make it as difficult as possible to run them locally.
Give it 5 years from now and reassess.
I think competition will get fierce. We see many people are attracted to the price stability of GHCP - it became clear what a request could do - the problem is that they didn't match results with cost. It's not clear what a 5 hour usage window in Claude Code can do.
There's no reason the harness couldn't provide a quote on the next request, aside from it takes effort and it would be upfront to the user, creating expectations.
*cries in Australian that has never had unlimited mobile data ever
> In March 2026, Windsurf replaced the credit-based system with a quota-based usage system. Instead of buying and spending credits, your plan now includes a daily and weekly usage allowance that refreshes automatically.
With hindsight, per-request pricing makes no sense at all if an agent can burn a widely varying amount of tokens satisfying that request. These pricing plans were designed before coding agents changed the dynamics of token usage.
So, lets do some honest evaluations:
1. The model itself is a non-deterministic engine of work with an unknown value; it's real value is just magic.
2. The business model itself is non-deterministic engine of profit with a known value; whatever the VCs have put into it, _must_ be piulled out. If Ed Zitron's numbers are correct, circa 2030, it's several trillion dollars.
So do some matrix multiplication of non-determinism vs determinism, and realize that the value proposition for _you_ is only going to decrease because #1 can never outpace #2, ensuring enshittification captures a smaller and smaller whale.
We know this. This has been the last 2 decades of money extraction from software. It was ok when it was some 12 year old's parents CC. But now it's you, or your business, that's going to either ben squeeze for value or squeeze out of the market.
And everyones squabbling about the color of the cost. ok
I agree though, it can't get cheaper than the cost of hardware it's just without sufficient documentation of the actual costs to run the cloud models, we can't really know what the "true" cost of each token is. I assume there's an economist out there somewhere that could figure it out though. Certainly, the cost should approach at a minimum a open weights model running on a local machine.
I've succesffully got Qwen3-coder-next to loop and generate sufficiently competent code and from what I can tell, the difference between this and the cloth is how quickly the gen happens and perhas how interactive it has to be.
But that would entail actual work and effort...and care for user's time and money.
The interesting question is how long it takes enterprises to notice the capability/pricing tradeoff, and whether they respond by limiting access to the strongest models internally.
The part that worries me is that this market is still very early. Most developers and organizations are still learning how to use these tools effectively. Raising the experimentation cost this much may slow down the discovery process that makes the tools valuable in the first place.
What we're seeing across the board is every software company tossing AI onto their name or sales pitch and no one understanding what that actually means. But we will spend money on it because of FOMO.
I really question if we're reaching the end of the hype cycle to the point. I wish I were brave enough to put money on it. It feels like there was a command from up top to 'do something with AI' and leadership is scambling for some resume-building projects vs doing the hard work they should've done the past two years at a people and process level.
It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.
Additionally, we got copilot for every user, including those that never write code or use AI tools.
Due to data governance it will be difficult to move to a different provider.
At the same time, this price hike is so large that the ROI on copilot will be a net negative.
I think what will ultimately happen is that we will not pay Microsoft more than we currently do and we'll simply end up with less AI usage in the company and a reduction in productivity.
These companies already lost the spark/innovation years ago. They're just using LLM's as a way to survive. Wonder how long that lasts.
I once asked it to do a comprehensive security review of our code. It churned for nearly an hour (and then produced 90% false positives). Insane that that usage was charged the same amount as me just saying "Hello".
With this kind of pricing (sonnet 4.6 has 9x multiplier, previously 1x) it begs the question why use Copilot to begin with.
You could easily just buy the tokens directly and have a lot more choice as well.
GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.
It also helped build an intuition of what wach model could do and which parts it was weaker at because you could try them almost side by side, especially if one model's output wasn't great.
That said, these were all side projects so nothing truly consequential. Otoh, you might leave some extra perf on the table but I found the models worked quite with the Copilot harness.
Gosh, imagine getting to do that with your TV/Streaming subscription. Getting to pay one fee to access some set number of hours per month from any of the providers.
If I could run a local model comparable to even Sonnet 4.6 without shelling out $50K in hardware, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But all I have is a 32 GB of RAM and an old RTX 4080.
Or am I not up to speed? Are there decent coding models that can run on dev laptops? Not that that's what you were suggesting by recommending a local model, necessarily; just curious.
That, and they have tool use issues.... https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1smzw6s/qwen35_a3...
I would check out the model mentioned in that thread, GGUF unsloth/qwen3.5-35b-a3b on Q4_K_M
I'm finding Google's Gemma 4 even better though - seems to hold up the agentic loop better than Qwen.
All will load into 20Gb of VRAM. None are amazing, but they do just about work.
With this pricing change, I see no reason at all to stick with Copilot in principle, but I really need to solve this issue of IDE integration to move on.
Other than that Zed has a similar experience which is pretty decent.
* By which I mean the good one, whatever it's called now - the part of Copilot that used to be a plugin and is now part of VS Code, not the thing that has always been part of VS Code.
Also heard of more and more people moving to Kilo Code or OpenChamber instead.
> What is the benefit of using the Copilot Pro+ at 39$/month instead of using the Copilot Pro at 10$/month and paying for extra usage?
On my personal account, Copilot Pro+ still only gave me back Opus 4.7, whereas my work's Pro account still lets me use Opus 4.6.
So, my gut says, it's entirely possible that Pro+ will continue to have more segregation on model availability...
FTA
> Last week, we also rolled out temporary changes to Copilot Individual plans, including Free, Pro, Pro+, and Student, and paused self-serve Copilot Business plan purchases. These were reliability and performance measures as we prepare for the broader transition to usage-based billing. We will loosen usage limits once usage-based billing is in effect.
There's enough weasel wording here that I would expect only certain models get re-enabled on Pro.
e.x. lots of people seem to get good enough results from Opus 4.6, personally I prefer it over 4.7 in GH Copilot... locking that down to Pro+ would be, given this salvo of enshittification, a 'logical' move on their part.
When I see how fast Codex max thinking GPT 5.5 eats our enterprise seat credits almost anything else seems cheap (until we switch our live systems from 5.4 api to 5.5 api I guess)... good thing I'm not the one paying for those credits and tokens (which is probably how most of the money is going to be made on AI going forward, borderline free chatbots for normies are done)
5.3-Codex is really good enough, Sonnet 4.6 is good enough.
Inference economics are going to be brutal in 2026 H2 when DeepSeek's new infra and model improvements come online, and Kimi launches K3. By brutal, I mean for OpenAI and Anthropic.
(I'm a copilot subscriber since 2022)
Opus 4.6 3x -> 27x
Opus 4.7 3x -> 27x
GPT 5.4 1x -> 6x
Before:
- Opus 4.6 each premium request is 3 premium requests
After:
- Opus 4.6 each dollar spent is 27 dollars in copilot AI Credits.
Given that you'll receive 19 dollars of AI Credits in Business plan, that means you can probably say 1 "hi" to opus per month.
If you are not on an annual plan, multipliers will be gone completely. You can see the rates that apply instead here: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...
> Users on annual Pro or Pro+ plans will remain on their existing plan with premium request-based pricing until their plan expires, however, model multipliers will increase on June 1 (see table).
Can you imagine ten months from now and you're still rolling Sonnet 4.6?
Cancel/refund is looking pretty good. They're doing refunds until May 20.
"To request a refund, go to Settings → Billing and licensing → Licensing, select Manage subscription, then choose Cancel and refund "subscription". (The phrasing varies slightly depending on your subscription ). This option will be available until May 20."
> Plan prices aren’t changing
did not continue with an em-dash followed by something profound that is changing.
Plan prices aren't changing -- the value you get out of it is.
On top of that, you’ve got 2000minutes of container runtime, so running cloud agents was included. As was anthropic agent sdk mode via copilot which is very comparable with claude code - not identical, the anthropic “modular prompt” is much leaner in the sdk version.
I cant say im mad, i got above what i paid in value. That said, going forward ill probably go back to openrouter payg rather than a subscription.
I got a free 3months of the gemini £19 plan and ive been playing quite a bit, 3.1 pro is a good model, i just find it slow. Flash i think i under appreciated until now.
I wouldn't mind a plan between Free and Pro that is just "all I care about is code completion and next edit suggestions".
1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire.
2. Github could offer, or the user could request, a pro-rated refund along with cancellation of the account.
3. Tough luck, those users agreed that Github could unilaterally change the ToS at any time.
They explicitly stated that they won't be doing that: the multipliers go into effect in June for everyone, annual plan or not.
For example, the German Civil Code states:
Section 308 - Prohibited clauses with the possibility of valuation
In standard business terms, the following in particular are ineffective:
[...]
4. (Reservation of the right to modify) the agreement of a right of the user [TL note: this means beneficiary of the terms, eg. party or other subject of the contract] to modify the performance promised or deviate from it, unless the agreement of the modification or deviation reasonably can be expected of the other party to the contract when the interests of the user are taken into account;But companies do lots of illegal things, and in general nobody takes them to court over it.
But what really surprised me most about Copilot is that it would bill you per question, nothing about tokens. So if I managed to produce a prompt that gave me back an insane amount of tokens for something, which using any Claude model would easily accomplish, you were giving me my money's worth, at your own expense. The math is not gonna math out forever.
One of the largest employers publicly engaging in a project which has the outcome of depressing wages. It's easier to "get" if you don't take the trillion dollar gorilla at face value.
This is just the start of the rug-pull
The issue currently is capacity. Servicing the models cost just peanuts of electricity but the popularity is killing them.
"It" being the end of subsidization of tokens and plans (expected) but while lock-in to foundational models and cloud services is still lacking. Guess investors want their ROI sooner than later, given how big of a wrench the AI boom has thrown into global economics.
I haven't been able to use my subscription much over the busy spring months, but i'm being charged every month.
I'd be tempted to keep the subscription if usage-based billing meant that i'd save money when i had less time.
But today, after hearing this, i cancelled my subscription.
If common people can have a DIY setup with an open source model cheaper than those behemoths with a scale advantage, it's clear that we have been played.
Time to either self host a Chinese open source model or to just pay the cheap Chinese providers.
[1] https://apfel.franzai.com/ [2] https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe
But that gives me a good while to determine if it's worth it or not. I've heard good and bad, so here's hoping for good or close to it.
I wasn't going to fork out $1000 on a chance it might be enough with a rough return strategy.
Flat subscriptions had one big advantage: zero cognitive overhead per request. That's worth more than people admit.
Z/Mimo already raised their prices multiple times since the promotional prices at the start of the year.
Turns out when a request can spawn tens of subagents and use millions of tokens over many turns of toolcalls then suddenly github copilot has a massive financial problem on their hands.
Were you able to see assisted AI coding savings proportional to costs increase now you are going to get?
Companies removed people as AI assisted coding will be cheaper and now coding cost are going up from fixed $X to non-deterministic. The posts by Uber few days back about spending 12 months' worth of money in 4 months tells a lot.
Only path forward seems using Open-source models and many companies don't use Chinese that makes only Mistral one as the option.
The background agents will also depreciate in value because of their harness that's a black box that's not optimized for token usage at all. Rolling one's own will be a better choice here.
This is the VSCode autocomplete stuff right? Really enjoy this.
> Copilot code review will also consume GitHub Actions minutes, in addition to GitHub AI Credits. These minutes are billed at the same per-minute rates as other GitHub Actions workflows.
That sucks.
I have Copilot Pro that I use occasionally, but not enough to tell how the switch to per use would affect my usage.
Based on description Pro plan users will get $10 in monthly AI Credits, but that seems rather low compared to what you could use same plan until now.
That's exactly where the subsidy is being removed.
Human retain knowledge, product knowledge, can pick up more work often for the same money. And having many of them means your business wont go down if provider suddenly bumps API pricing.
Talent and skill is for sure not the reason, coz biggest names now seem to all be immigrants.
The plan is to normalize spending hundreds/thousands on tokens per month for the productivity you gain.
See Jensen Huang’s comment that every $500k developer should spend at least $250k worth of tokens per year.
- I plan everything in ChatGPT. I provide project trees and create an execution plan for Claude Code, Codex, or Copilot agents. - I clearly say I do not want the agent to explain what it will do or what it did. I only want "I finished". That saves extra tokens. My projects include tools to gather file contents in bulk. A single command like bun copy-paste FILES="<file1> <file2>" lets the agent collect many files into one file. - I also provide a bun create-empty-files command so the agent can create all needed files at once instead of one by one.
With this setup, I managed to build 4 major features (more than 80 file edits or creations) using the 3 daily resets on a standard plan.
having seen tens of millions of tokens (total; albeit not split by type) for a plan-agent workflow of a simple few line change, they should be also spending time on optimizing their internal orchestration.
i think the claude licensing on time-based limits would have been the least frustrating outcome, even if for the short-term. anyways, it was fun while it lasted (especially when opus 4.6 was initially 1x lol).
also, recession indicator anyone?
And then they have the gall to say
> "The bottom line: Plan prices aren’t changing"
If anyone lives in a place like Germany or Australia and has an annual sub, please take them to court, you're guaranteed to win because you have reasonable consumer protections and their ToS doesn't stand a chance. 9x reduction is unreasonable and the consumer cannot be expected to see this coming.
In case some diehard enshittifier believes that consumers should know better and businesses should be allowed to get away with it, where is the line? 99% reduction? Is that still okay?
If this situation is to be acceptable then it should be regulated as a financial product like stocks, which come with knowledge tests of "do you know you can lose all of your money?". And come with regulatory compliance and all that.
"VibeBrowser", "Financial Database API for Vibe Coders" followed by dozens of self feeding AI projects with barely anyone doing anything that isn't related to AI.
1. Current models in fact do not solve coding.
2. You can simply wait for a ~year for open-source to catch up and run it locally.
Re 2: Open weight models seem to be less than a year behind proprietary ones, so sure, if you're willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a super computer that you probably don't fully utilize instead of renting time on someone else's super computer for a lot less.
i tried the continue vscode extension, and it seemed kind of janky. are there better options?
-BYOK runs are $0 to Mouse, period.
-Hosted runs are billed at provider cost + a published markup.
-We will never invent a unit of billing that isn't denominated in tokens, seconds, or tool calls.
-Credits in the paid category never expire.
And DeepSeek V4 Flash is comparable to Gemini Flash at also a fraction of the cost.
These models are just quite chatty from my experience. Only downside.
And DeepSeek is planning to deploy to their own Huawei TPUs, halving their already cheap prices.
AI itself clearly weaker / dumber. Prices increased manyfold.
[0] - Last weeks changes limited my personal Copilot Pro account but not my Work one
Google won
That is, redact copilot from the bill for customers that dont use it.