GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing (github.blog)

697 points by frizlab 20 hours ago

theanonymousone 18 hours ago

Something is hilariously off here: Why should I pay $10 and be forced to use it by the end of the month, while I can pay $10 and have it last as long as I want?

Their "API pricing" is exactly the same as that of providers: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

everfrustrated 17 hours ago

I'm thinking the same. Downgrade to Pro and use OpenRouter (same price) for overage.

Seems a massive loss for Microsoft. Presumably there's a further rugpull to come.

asdfasgasdgasdg 17 hours ago

> 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.

rurp 16 hours ago

munk-a 13 hours ago

theanonymousone 17 hours ago

I'm already on Pro. Why should I keep it?

rs38 15 hours ago

saratogacx 10 hours ago

hununu 16 hours ago

quietsegfault 12 hours ago

OpenRouter charges a 5% (?) fee for buying credits.

XCSme an hour ago

mdesq 15 hours ago

I have to wonder if it's because of how many Enterprise customers they have who have standardized on Github Copilot and gotten it through the gauntlet of legal approvals etc.

pverheggen 14 hours ago

This rings true to me as someone who's worked at a few large corps like this. A price hike does not change things when there is a mandate to use MS products over other vendors.

codebje 10 hours ago

That is exactly where I am.

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.

on_the_train 9 hours ago

Bingo. Ghcp is the only allowed llm solution at our big well known semiconductor corp. It'll take years to get approval for anything else. We're stuck with it and will pay whatever price we have to.

XCSme an hour ago

I am a bit confused by the separation between VSCode and Copilot. If I cancel my Pro+ subscription, can I still use Copilot with my own OpenRouter key?

gpm 18 hours ago

I'm wondering if they're basically saying they're going to give $10/month free API credits to students and open source maintainers and so on... while otherwise getting out of the consumer portion of this space.

redsaber 16 hours ago

they're downsizing free github copilot pro for open source maintainers. At the very least, it looks like small open source projects got their free copilot pro cut off

rmast 11 hours ago

fooey 14 hours ago

for my experience currently, I greatly prefer the VSCode Copilot extension experience over the Claude Extension

I think VSCode only supports copilot for "autocomplete" too

on top of that, you need GitHub Copilot for the PR reviewer functionality in GitHub

cityofdelusion 14 hours ago

Huh, I find my copilot plugin to be so incredibly glitchy. My agents are always reporting that their shells are mangled that commands are truncated and all kinds of nonsense. Sometimes they spin up dev servers fine other times it just hangs waiting for a terminal response. So far I have found relying on the CLI from the model providers to be significantly more reliable.

I do like the integrations with the IDE however, they are convenient for rapidly reviewing changes. I just need their terminals to actually work!

evilsnoopi3 12 hours ago

theanonymousone 5 hours ago

You can use Copilot extension with OpenRouter (among others).

And yes, I need to find a solution for autocomplete. It used to be available in free tier of Copilot. Not sure anymore.

ezfe 17 hours ago

Enterprise gets pooled credits and will like having everything go through one place so I think it still works.

mnahkies 17 hours ago

You can pool credits through open router (afaik, I'm only using a single user account), but if you top-up $10 per user, per month, any unused credits will rollover.

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.

MartinodF 5 hours ago

J_Shelby_J 17 hours ago

Is there a way to use the autocomplete feature with an api?

ezfe 10 hours ago

No but autocomplete is not part of this billing change

krzyk 4 hours ago

my002 19 hours ago

The era of subsidised inference is truly ending. The new model multipliers (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...) seem like a huge leap, though. From 1x to 6x for new-ish GPT and Sonnet models. 27x for Opus...

Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.

giwook 19 hours ago

Lots of us have noticed that usage limits for Claude have been nerfed in recent weeks/months.

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.

dualvariable 18 hours ago

However, inference costs for entirely good enough models are likely to keep declining in the future. We're probably hitting diminishing returns on model size and training. The new generations aren't quantum leaps anymore, and newer generations of open source models like DeepSeek are likely to start getting good enough.

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...]

geodel 18 hours ago

croes 18 hours ago

giwook 18 hours ago

Fire-Dragon-DoL 18 hours ago

hirako2000 17 hours ago

It does feel like the music is about to stop.

It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.

Gigachad 13 hours ago

ctoth 17 hours ago

stefan_ 15 hours ago

Dunno, if in this day and age you are making inference more expensive, more scarce, you are honestly moving in the wrong direction and DeepSeek and others will gladly take your lunch.

Gigachad 13 hours ago

sergiotapia 12 hours ago

That is folly because there is very minimal cost to switching providers, let alone models.

bluescrn 17 hours ago

Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?

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.

hansmayer 15 hours ago

rwyinuse 16 hours ago

flir 16 hours ago

soraisdead 10 hours ago

skeeter2020 19 hours ago

"This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users."

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.

torben-friis 17 hours ago

The sooner the better. Let's take a look at the long term, enshittified, viable product before we get too dependent on the trial version.

fsniper 18 hours ago

And enshitification starts.

specproc 19 hours ago

Yeah, totally. The recent pricing changes have just made my Copilot subscription go from great deal to awful value over night.

I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.

cedws 19 hours ago

Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.

ffsm8 18 hours ago

attentive 10 hours ago

AntiUSAbah 18 hours ago

webworker 11 hours ago

I will not be renewing/switching over, either.

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.

nacs 19 hours ago

Even Sonnet 4.6 is 9x multiplier (previously 1x)!

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.

krzyk 4 hours ago

They do for any new plan. Those multipliers are only for people that paid annually. After their subscription ends they'll go into token based pricing like the rest of people.

mitjam 14 hours ago

I understand it like : the 10 usd is for handling the business record, maybe also the harness, I get a few coins to kick tires, but to use it for anything real it’s pay as you go by the tokens list price.

altmanaltman 18 hours ago

> 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

tjoff 16 hours ago

ItsClo688 19 hours ago

27x for Opus is genuinely shocking. at that point you're not paying for convenience anymore, you're just paying a GitHub tax. OpenRouter or direct API makes way more sense unless you're really glued to the IDE integration.

thrdbndndn 19 hours ago

I keep seeing people mention OpenRouter.

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?

rvnx 19 hours ago

sandos an hour ago

Wow, having a corp. account I do wonder WHEN we are getting some kind of resctriction of usage, or require us to justify our usage.

That GPT4-mini change is going to be brutal! Its much better than 5-mini, which was itself much better than earlier free models.

mullingitover 12 hours ago

The point of this loss leading is to properly hoover up the money in the pockets of enterprise customers, get them locked into the idea that they need the latest and greatest cloud-based model, while simultaneously starving everyone of the memory they'd need in order to run competent models locally.

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.

johndough 17 hours ago

It's interesting that the cost multiplier for Claude Sonnet 4/4.5/4.6 varies so much (1/6/9), while the API cost is exactly the same for all three models.

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.

vanviegen 16 hours ago

On GitHub copilot you pay per prompt. More powerful models can do a lot more work (consuming a lot more tokens) per prompt. Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.

johndough 13 hours ago

krzyk 4 hours ago

Those multiplier are only for grandfathered Pro an Pro+ plans that had annual billing, basically a way to scare people of out of those plans. Ant new ones (and bussiness+enterprise plans) will be on token based billing since June 1.

rvnx 19 hours ago

One theory of the play of SpaceX might do if everyone migrates to query-based billing:

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

AntiUSAbah 18 hours ago

They probably want the training data. Otherwise these 60B don't make sense at all.

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?

minimaxir 19 hours ago

It takes longer to build a datacenter with that much capacity than it does for the market to respond.

2ndorderthought an hour ago

hgoel 13 hours ago

I think they're going to have to do a lot to overcome the Musk and Grok poison. Even ChatGPT hasn't had as many lapses as Grok has had.

gigiogigione 18 hours ago

I don’t get the SpaceX reference. I thought they made rockets?

victorbjorklund 17 hours ago

vizzier 18 hours ago

joelthelion 6 hours ago

Can't wait for people to migrate to open tools (opencode/openrouter). This will unlock a lot of innovation.

(I know openrouter is not open, but it allows competition and should be easily replaceable if needed)

youwangd 3 hours ago

Show HN timing matters more than people think. Monday-Thursday, 9-11am Pacific, is when the front page has the most engaged readers. Weekend posts get less competition but also less engagement.

mkhalil 15 hours ago

Why would folks be better paying 5.5% fee to OpenRouter ("Open") if most people just use one or two providers? Just use the provider's API.

djeastm 12 hours ago

The routing automatically routes you to other inference providers (for the same model) if/when the original provider goes down.

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.

sally_glance 6 hours ago

For me the largest value-add is the unified API. Being able to instantly start trialling a new model with zero code changes is well worth 5%. The other part is not having to deal with billing for multiple platforms.

minimaxir 19 hours ago

What's annoying is that it's obvious. In the case of GPT 5.5, if Copilot is going to charge 7.5x what GPT 5.4 costs while OpenAI themselves via the API/Codex only charges 2x of what GPT 5.4 costs, that will immediately raise an eyebrow.

boothby 19 hours ago

To anybody who's been watching the tech sector with a critical eye for pretty much any period from the late 90s and onward, this is just the enshittification process. For most of OpenAI's existence it's been obvious, to me, that investors were burning insane levels of capital to build the market, and now that folks are locked in, you're seeing higher fees, ads, etc. Yet again, the user is the product; the investors want to siphon your data, attention and once you're hooked, money. And for companies like Microsoft and Apple, those hooks can dig deep.

Ekaros 6 hours ago

Incipient 19 hours ago

Gagarin1917 18 hours ago

itemize123 8 hours ago

unless the 5.4 price is a huge loss leader for them

recitedropper 17 hours ago

Everyone seems to believe OpenRouter isn't subsidizing but, until they publish audited financials, I personally doubt it.

deaux 17 hours ago

OpenRouter doesn't even have hardware. What are they possibly subsidizing? The platform costs?

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.

ValentineC 13 hours ago

recitedropper 16 hours ago

Mattwmaster58 19 hours ago

FYI, these are the multipliers for annual plan. I would hazard a guess most people are not on an annual plan

mitjam 14 hours ago

I am and I see it as stopping the music at a party when you want everyone to go home without telling them to go home. There is also the offer to quit with prorated refund for the remaining time. I think I am going to take it.

themafia 14 hours ago

We can't even get slop delivery worked out. So use SlopAggregator instead.

2ndorderthought 14 hours ago

I don't know if it's just me but copilot kind of sucks. I've been running local models with like 9b parameters and they are about as good if not better. Obviously there's no integrations or whatever and I get most people are probably paying for that than anything else but eh. Big no thanks from me.

whateveracct 19 hours ago

"eras" tend to not be so short lol

siva7 18 hours ago

That's so unfair to us hard working developers. A month ago i could buy for .4$ a turn with Sonnet. Now i have to pay at least .9$ for this turn. Weeks ago i could buy for .12$ an Opus turn after they already raised prices and now they want .27$ from me for the same product! They are stealing from us!

asdfasgasdgasdg 18 hours ago

They aren't stealing from us, for several reasons. First of all, it's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like the prices, use something else. Or don't use AI at all.

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.

croes 18 hours ago

The already stole when they trained their models on the data.

Now they just increase the price to buy it back

Ilaurens 19 hours ago

"Your plan pricing is unchanged: Copilot Pro remains $10/month and Pro+ remains $39/month, and each includes $10 and $39 in monthly AI Credits, respectively."

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?

Someone1234 19 hours ago

Yep.

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.

to11mtm 19 hours ago

They do address this in the doc, Orgs can now (although it was vague as to whether it was an option or just the new standard, probably option due to business contracts) 'pool' the Usage billing across all users.

I'm guessing they did that (and the 'temporary bonus credits') to make the pill easier to swallow for that side of customers.

Someone1234 19 hours ago

Mattwmaster58 19 hours ago

DominikPeters 19 hours ago

They mention in the announcement that it will be possible to pool usage across an organization.

freedomben 19 hours ago

This was my first thought too. "Oh cool, I should be seeing lower prices" as I don't use Co-pilot that often anymore. But no, that's not the case. It rather served to remind me that I should probably just cancel.

stetrain 19 hours ago

They could add rollover balances and be back to cell phone plans in the early 2000s.

kalleboo 7 hours ago

Only if we also get unlimited nights & weekends.

joegibbs 13 hours ago

$39 of credits at API costs is useless too, what are you going to do there, a single hour of coding? One half of a feature per month?

polski-g 7 hours ago

That's enough for 4 days of programming if you use GLM5.

cush 19 hours ago

Are you thinking something like rollover plans?

hakunin 18 hours ago

Everybody who says it's a 5-9-27x seems to not be aware of the obvious loophole. More like 50x increase. You were able to use over $500 worth of Opus on a $10/mo Github plan easily, no hacks. You could just prompt "plan this out for me, don't stop until fully planned, don't ask any questions", and you would get ~$5 worth of planning in one 3x request. At 100 requests/mo, each easily reaching $5, that's easy $500 worth of tokens.

fomoz 17 hours ago

Bingo. I created a few autonomous skills that did exactly that for plan review, implementation, and branch review, review autonomously until green.

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.

nonfamous 13 hours ago

And this, right here, is why none of us can have nice, cheap things.

alexandra_au an hour ago

4gotunameagain 7 hours ago

hakunin 17 hours ago

Yeah it was crazy. Nowadays I use pi with OpenAI GPT 5.4/5.5, which to me seems both better and more generous than Claude. I supplement it with OpenCode Zen to get access to a bunch of models at token cost, and OpenCode Go ($10/mo) to get subscription-style access to Kimi, GLM and friends.

bryanhogan 16 hours ago

johndough 14 hours ago

That was not my experience. When I tried to use Opus for longer tasks with Copilot, it would fill up the context completely and then crash without any output, while still consuming premium requests. (At least from September 2025 to January this year. Haven't tried after that.)

bubbab 9 hours ago

Copilot has improved immensely in 2026. I'd say to give it a try again if you're up for it. It works about as well as Claude Code these days in my experience.

oezi an hour ago

johndough 3 hours ago

hakunin 14 hours ago

On pi coding agent, it worked very well for me over the past few months, but started glitching more recently, just prior to this announcement.

self_awareness 3 hours ago

Squarex 18 hours ago

Even more so, questions and user answers from agents were not charged as separate requests.

SeriousM 17 hours ago

And when you make your harness ask you for next steps in a tool call, the journey continues forever, yeehaa

krzyk 4 hours ago

Yeah, people learned.

I created a 4 subagents that polled for new tasks, and restart after ~5h.

It was a great run.

mohsen1 16 hours ago

This was my solution to very very though compiler tests that would take sometime up to 4 hours to figure out. Some of the time would be spent on running the tests, but still... I was burning so much tokens. I have free Copilot for my open source work so I wasn't even paying the $20.

this is the project that I am working on https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz

pojzon 17 hours ago

I did many 1h+ sessions of agent asking questions, delegating to subagents - all for 1 premium request.

I would say its a x1000 increase in price for agentic workflows.

NSPG911 12 hours ago

exactly why i loved Github Copilot, you could pull of these shenanigans, and nothing would ever happen. That was the best part of it

but now, you get literally nothing

4ndrewl 19 hours ago

"Plan prices aren’t changing.”

Isn't this like saying "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo is now a Honda. But the price hasn't changed!"

canada_dry 19 hours ago

This may be a more accurate analogy... "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo now only allows you a maximum of 100km of travel. You will be automatically charged extra when you go over that."

parliament32 17 hours ago

A whopping 100km per month for the low price of $199.99!*

* with a quota of 138 meters per hour, overage charges may apply

adgjlsfhk1 18 hours ago

more like 100m

SomeUserName432 3 hours ago

Having rented cars a lot, this is actually quite common.

tsanzer 2 hours ago

What country, I haven't seen anything but unlimited miles for over a decade.

larschdk 18 hours ago

On top of being worth less, the subscriber discounts are gone.

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.

Hamuko 18 hours ago

Yeah, if I go to a petrol station with 50€, but only get a tenth of the amount of petrol I got last week, I may think that the price has in fact changed.

Waterluvian 19 hours ago

"Your monthly fee isn't changing but it now only covers about 3 days of driving."

predkambrij 15 hours ago

More like, The Porsche you had for a month you'll now have for 5 min only.

croes 18 hours ago

More like, the rising gas prices aren’t a problem, I only ever fill up for $40

deeviant 19 hours ago

It's more like saying, "and you may now only use the Porsche for 5 minutes out of every day."

dayjaby 18 hours ago

Full brake on the autobahn if you hit your 5min limit

KoftaBob 16 hours ago

It’s technically true that the plan prices haven’t changed, it’s just the value you get from those plans has plummeted. It’s classic deceptive sales language.

pphysch 17 hours ago

They are now charging per gallon instead of a flat rate per trip

sefrost 19 hours ago

I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code. Turns out there’s a GitHub Copilot CLI!

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?

https://github.com/features/copilot/cli

0xffff2 17 hours ago

I'm curious about the opposite: Why would anyone use the CLI when, at least with Copilot, the VSCode plugin is super tightly integrated with VSCode, meaning the agent can see everything I can see. There's no mismatch in linter calls where I can see a lint in the ide that the agent can't find for example. I've had this problem even using CC in their VSCode extension, so I can't imagine it's not an issue in the CLI as well.

What's actually better in the CLI?

sz4kerto 16 hours ago

We need sandboxing for any agent, so we run it within Docker - so we use CLI.

0xffff2 15 hours ago

nl 9 hours ago

I use the Claude Code VSCode plugin for 80% of my work.

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.

krzyk 4 hours ago

Austizzle 19 hours ago

The vs code integration is pretty slick. I can copy and paste function names into the prompt and it automatically turns them into these `#sym:` reference objects that I presume populate the context window with metadata about the function and where it lives. It knows what file I'm currently looking at as I jump around in the code, and that automatically gets loaded into the context. I can also drag and drop folders or specific files for context into the sidebar.

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

data-ottawa 18 hours ago

I’m actually trying to move back from the Claude Code style, I feel like it’s easy to become distant from your own code, and I am feeling uncomfortable with that.

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.

saratogacx 19 hours ago

I've used it quite a bit. There are a lot of AI terminal coding products and this is another one. It works well, handles sub-agents without issue and does a reasonable job operating in the Copilot ecosystem. It handles mid-task questions and such we well.

sefrost 19 hours ago

I’ve tried OpenCode, Claude Code and Codex CLI. But was just shocked that Microsoft has a version I hadn’t even heard of.

Personally I got CLI fatigue and am happy with Conductor for now, but things are moving fast in this space.

everfrustrated 18 hours ago

zmj 15 hours ago

Yeah, I've been using it heavily at work since the beginning of January (and have a personal Anthropic sub to compare to). Copilot CLI is pretty good, honestly. Most new features in Claude Code get cloned by Copilot CLI within a couple weeks. Claude models seem mildly more clumsy in that harness than the one they're trained on - subjective guess around 20% more turns for an equivalent task - but it's not a noticeable difference in the final output.

brunoborges 18 hours ago

The other cool thing is Copilot SDK, so you can build agentic capabilities into apps, or build tools, that leverage the agent harness of the Copilot CLI:

https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/

KronisLV 19 hours ago

> I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code.

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.

baby_souffle 17 hours ago

> also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files <...> 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!

referenceo 12 hours ago

tjhei 10 hours ago

Cursor (paid) and antigravity (free) come to mind.

WorldMaker 17 hours ago

That's espoused as the big reason for the price increase: most Copilot subscribed developers it seems have moved to "agentic usage" with the CLI and Cloud-based agents.

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.

dktp 15 hours ago

It's in their ToS to allow using Copilot subscription with OpenCode - https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...

Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now

UlisesAC4 7 hours ago

Liability. I work in a tightly regulated market and I cannot use any service due to be in touch with PII data. If it was my option I would just use OpenCode with deepseek, it is more than enough for the majority of my tasks.

bsdz 19 hours ago

I've used it. It's on par with OpenCode imho.

boc 19 hours ago

I'm just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7

Ronsenshi 17 hours ago

I don't know about others, but I use Copilot more often than other apps because of its tight integration with the VS Code itself where I still spend most of my time working on other things while letting AI do some task that I decided to delegate to it.

gavmor 14 hours ago

claude/gemini/crush inside of agent-of-empires inside of ghostty in one window, and zed in the other for touch-ups.

danbrooks 18 hours ago

I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.

junto 14 hours ago

Quite honestly I love the GitHub Copilot CLI. I pair it with Squad and it’s awesome.

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).

Merad 15 hours ago

I've been using it for a few months because Copilot was the only AI blessed by our corporate overlords. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code, which I've used extensively on personal projects. However CC was recently approved, and I'm betting that with these changes to Copilot pricing we'll end up dropping it like a hot potato.

on_the_train 19 hours ago

Because Copilot is the only thing allowed at our corp

dobroezlo 16 hours ago

it's my favourite harness so far

csomar 18 hours ago

Search has become so bad that I also struggled to find Claude Code alternative and made my own tight (not editors, not plugins, not agents, strictly similar to Claude Code CLI) list: https://github.com/omarabid/cli-llm-coding

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).

nickjj 19 hours ago

I don't use Copilot or any paid AI but all of this usage-based billing reminds me of cellphones back when you paid per individual text message.

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.

Latty 17 hours ago

I expect in the future we'll find out that someone in the industry was juicing the numbers with fake thinking tokens or something. The whole pricing model of charging you for the tokens it generates while not knowing how much it is going to generate going in has always been pretty crazy.

ThunderSizzle 3 hours ago

It reminds of early smart phones when the cell providers pulled away from unlimited data...and then they brought it back in s few years.

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.

Sohcahtoa82 17 hours ago

Yeah, this was my frustration with Suno and Sora. You can burn a lot of credits (not to mention time) generating things that aren't what you wanted.

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.

benoau 11 hours ago

Internet usage when you billed by the hour but your connection was so slow it took a minute plus to load pages lol.

tencentshill 16 hours ago

It incentivizes you to do most of that prompting on your own hardware/time, and only feed the final prompt with only necessary context to the big AI in the sky. It might even force you to think about the problems yourself for a bit!

DaiPlusPlus 17 hours ago

> I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise.

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.

Ballas 4 hours ago

That page compares models that easily fit inside the ram on either GPU. The biggest difference comes when one card can fit a model and the other cannot.

simonw 19 hours ago

Windsurf made a similar change in March: https://docs.windsurf.com/windsurf/accounts/quota

> 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.

Incipient 19 hours ago

I wouldn't call it hindsight - I don't think anyone, at any stage, thought running a 10 minute+ sonnet session for 1 premium credit was ever profitable. We all knew it was a loss leader to get people using it.

simonw 18 hours ago

It would have been profitable if that premium credit cost more than a negotiated discounted rate with Anthropic. We have no way of knowing if there were negotiated rates though!

computerex 17 hours ago

cyanydeez 17 hours ago

Lihh27 18 hours ago

per-request was broken, yeah. but $10 of monthly credits is basically just a prepaid wallet with a reset timer.

born_a_skeptic 19 hours ago

I wonder if GitHub (Microsoft) is implicitly betting that enterprise demand is sticky enough to absorb these rates, especially given that Opus 4.6 “fast” was being listed at a 27x multiplier. Maybe they saw enough usage at that price point to conclude the demand is real. Or maybe the strategy is to keep the enterprise customers who can justify it while shedding heavier individual and power-user usage.

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.

koyote 12 hours ago

As someone who works in a Microsoft shop with Copilot, I am curious to see what happens.

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.

ramon156 2 hours ago

yes. even in my province that's relatively behind on tech, at least +-20% were already strongly relying on Microsoft (Azure) and thought adopting Copilot was a no-brainer. That ofcourse comes with autonomous programming, because we're paying for it anyway!

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.

datacynic 15 hours ago

I also suspect that there are many "slow-moving", Microsoft heavy enterprises but with in-house devs that can't get anything but Copilot approved, and Microsoft trusts this will remain so.

It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.

hightrix 15 hours ago

As a single data point, this is absolutely true. At my current "Big Corp", Copilot was immediately approved while Claude is entering month 2 or 3 of trying to get approval.

Additionally, we got copilot for every user, including those that never write code or use AI tools.

NSPG911 12 hours ago

Opus 4.6 "Fast" was originally at 10x, literally the same cost as Opus 4.1. After promotion period, it was 30x.

JBlue42 18 hours ago

As someone that is on the enterprise side in a non-tech F500 company, what I'm seeing is some FOMO and need to be part of the hype cycle. We're about to plonk a bunch of money on more Copilot licenses. Something got in the water where all the C-levels the past two months are pushing everyone to use AI but when they bring up examples of their uses its like "I use it to rewrite my emails" or prompt 'engineering' ideas that point more to patching over poor processes, data management, and decision-making within the organization or not.

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.

WatchDog 10 hours ago

I'm at an org, where every medium to large company meeting talks about AI in similar breathless non-specific terms, yet m365 copilot is the only approved AI chat, and GH copilot the only AI coding tool.

csomar 18 hours ago

Subsidies stop when LLMs improvement plateaued (though they still benchmark higher somehow). At some point, you have to make money or at least break even; and I think they concluded that we reached that point.

curtisblaine 15 hours ago

I really hope that they think so and that they're wrong and they get burned hard. Them and all the AI labs that lied, stole, inflated, hoarded and tried to justify all this as an existential moment where AGI would radically change society. I hope their calculus to reel in paying users is all wrong and now they all crash and burn instead of recouping VC money.

boesboes 4 hours ago

After 2 months of using copilot pro, they've charged us 22$ in premium requests for my user, i spend roughly 1900$ in tokens, going of the on-demand pricing. This is estimated to be around 40-60% of real costs. They are undercharging by a factor 50 to 90!

This is just the start of the rug-pull

oezi 37 minutes ago

If the real cost where really 1900 / 50% = 3800 USD per month then you could rent your own H200 with 140 GB VRAM.

The issue currently is capacity. Servicing the models cost just peanuts of electricity but the popularity is killing them.

postalcoder 19 hours ago

Github had, by far, the most easily game-able agent usage policy. People would force the agent to run a script before the end of turns that consisted entirely of `input("prompt: ")` so that you could essentially talk endlessly to an agent for the price of a turn. I see this less about the future of this industry and more about fighting the costs incurred by bad actors.

0xffff2 16 hours ago

I never played any games like that, but simply giving the agent a clear exit criteria and instructions to check the exit criteria every time it thinks it's done on a complex task was often enough to keep it chugging away for most of a day on a single prompt in my experience. Per-prompt pricing just isn't sustainable period, even if everyone is acting in good faith.

Sohcahtoa82 17 hours ago

Charging by prompt was always wild to me.

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".

hansmayer an hour ago

Are you telling me that inference costs did not go down, as the AI crowd keeps preaching?

_pdp_ 19 hours ago

There is noticeable trend across all agentic coding platforms that this situation is no longer sustainable.

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.

sottol 19 hours ago

One reason I used it was that I wasn't locked into a single provider and switching them was as easy as changing a drop-down. Small feature? Sonnet or GPT5.4/mini? Large changes? Opus. And why not see how good Raptor Mini does this one refactor?

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.

Waterluvian 19 hours ago

Yeah, this is a very useful abstraction layer. The entire concept of separating the model creator from the model runner is good for competition and is customer friendly. Which means they likely hate the concept and want to kill it.

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.

Incipient 19 hours ago

The problem is I can't afford the tokens! Even on my $10/mo plan, running either 100 opus, or 300 sonnet agent runs would cost hundreds of dollars - well above my budget!

bsdz 19 hours ago

Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?

minimaxir 19 hours ago

Economics of scale don't work when scale still isn't enough and capacity is still limited.

GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.

vdfs 17 hours ago

_pdp_ 19 hours ago

It seems to me more expensive but I might be reading it wrong.

infecto 19 hours ago

Looking at their pricing it does not look the case.

kanemcgrath 17 hours ago

I liked copilot because I didn't have to think about tokens. I get hung up when having to think about the price of things, and its hard to think about the project at the same time I got to think about token usage like a gas bill. The usage system had its own issues, but having a set amount of requests was a very comfortable way to use a paid AI service.

cyanydeez 17 hours ago

Sounds like you're a candidate for a local model. It's kinda nice not caring what the token count means except as to compaction.

brushfoot 17 hours ago

Not paying per token? Not sending my code to someone else's servers for inference? That's the stuff of sweet dreams for a stingy, paranoid solopreneur like me.

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.

robertkarl 14 hours ago

kanemcgrath 17 hours ago

I do love using local models when I can, but qwen-35B is the best model I can run, and while its an insanely good local model, it does not compare to the big ones.

deaux 17 hours ago

0xffff2 17 hours ago

So given that I primarily interact with LLM's through VSCode, and I prefer the Copilot interface to the Claude Code plugin, does anyone have any suggestions on other plugins I should try? In my experience, Copilot is much more "plugged in" than any of the other plugins, in the sense that it can see things like linter outputs in VSCode. Basically, copilot "sees what I see" in a way that no other plugin or command line tool can, which make it much more ergonomic to use.

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.

daemonologist 17 hours ago

You can use Copilot Chat* with basically any API provider, and if you switch to the VS Code Insiders build you can configure it to use literally any OpenAI API-compatible endpoint.

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.

veb 17 hours ago

Try Cline, a vscode plugin that's been around since the start and has really active development. You can also use most providers as well.

bryanhogan 16 hours ago

Saw this new Cline fork mentioned in another post: https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac

Also heard of more and more people moving to Kilo Code or OpenChamber instead.

polski-g 7 hours ago

herpdyderp 17 hours ago

I used to feel exactly like you do, but now I use the Claude CLI exclusively and am very pleased with the results.

0xffff2 16 hours ago

Could you elaborate on what's better about the CLI?

herpdyderp 14 hours ago

try-working 12 hours ago

Cancelling. Going with Codex $100, Kimi annual plan, DeepSeek API, and a local LLM once I get a Mac Studio.

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.

aitchnyu 5 hours ago

What about Minimax? Their api pricing is half of Kimi and Z.ai.

try-working an hour ago

Their models are too small for coding. Maybe with M3, we'll see.

deweller 19 hours ago

Has anyone found the answer to this yet?

> 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?

bewuethr 19 hours ago

Some models, for example Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, are only available on Pro+; Pro+ has audit logs and GitHub Spark; that's about it, as far as I can tell from https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/copilot/g...

Culonavirus 13 hours ago

Yes there's no Opus at all on Pro. GPT 5.5 is also missing. Then again what would you expect, the economic reality is beginning to hit. Also I can't be too mad when the "base" models (GPT 5.4...) are still available and decent.

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)

to11mtm 19 hours ago

If I had to guess...

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.

edzitron 18 hours ago

pauleveritt 12 hours ago

You should indeed feel vindicated. Me too, I've been a paid subscriber for months and eagerly read every word. <wink> But yes, I feel like this is the first of several vindications you have coming.

theideaofcoffee 17 hours ago

I thought of this as soon as I saw the headline: I hope this is the start. Crossing my fingers to see more line up with your predictions.

jareds 18 hours ago

What's the current situation for coding with Local LLM's on decent hardware? I have an M3 Max with 64 gb of ram and am thinking I should start looking at Ollama and Opencode? Is this a useful stack for smaller personal projects?

speedgoose 16 hours ago

It’s getting there. You could give a try with qwen 3.6. It’s worth paying for better models in the cloud, but local models are now better than nothing.

pohl 17 hours ago

One nice development recently was ollama's support for MLX optimization on Mac hardware. It's not obvious how to know you're using a model that works with it, yet, so it's rough around the edges.

https://ollama.com/blog/mlx

satvikpendem 15 hours ago

Use llama.cpp or better yet Unsloth Studio

gyoridavid 19 hours ago

After seeing the ridicolous multiplier increase I've added a calendar event to cancel my subscription mid-May.

(I'm a copilot subscriber since 2022)

herpdyderp 17 hours ago

Already cancelled here! One less thing tied to GitHub.

everfrustrated 19 hours ago

Current multipliers vs from June

  Opus 4.6  3x -> 27x
  Opus 4.7  3x -> 27x
  GPT  5.4  1x ->  6x
EDIT: only applies to annual plans

kristjansson 19 hours ago

I think that only applies to held-over users on the annual plan:

> 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).

larschdk 18 hours ago

There will surely be corresponding, different AI credit costs for each model.

gpm 18 hours ago

cbovis 16 hours ago

Kind of. Monthly users moving to an entire different pricing model so we don't really know what the increase in price will be for them.

fud101 17 hours ago

Thanks this is helpful. I am on my first month of annual Pro. Should I keep it or cancel it (ask for a refund)?

wspittman 17 hours ago

motoboi 19 hours ago

Not apples for apples.

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.

t-sauer 19 hours ago

It is an apples for apples comparison since those new multipliers only count if you are on an annual plan in which case the premium request system stays in place until you either cancel and get a refund or until your renewal comes up. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/usage-ba...

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...

kristjansson 19 hours ago

everfrustrated 18 hours ago

alecsm 19 hours ago

GPT 5.4mini is even worse, from 0.33x to 6x which is ~18 times more expensive now.

minimaxir 19 hours ago

GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 mini are now the same price, which, why?

t-sauer 19 hours ago

bachmeier 19 hours ago

GPT 4.1 had a multiplier of 0.

stabbles 19 hours ago

I was surprised to find that this sentence

> 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.

giancarlostoro 15 hours ago

They're not the only ones in the AI sphere to wind back, but they're the weirdest case in my eyes. Microsoft invests in having engineers building open models and they don't use a single one. I really don't get 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.

themafia 14 hours ago

> I really don't get it.

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.

CraigJPerry 19 hours ago

The cheapest copilot plan felt totally unsustainable to me. For around £8 month i was getting 100 opus 4.6 prompts (albeit with a reduced context window size around 128k iirc vs 200k to 1m for first party hosted opus). Gpt5.4 was hosted with 400k context iirc.

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.

netule 19 hours ago

I pay for Copilot annually, and mostly for its code auto completion features. I use CC if I want to do anything agentic. Not sure if I want to pay more for occasionally-good-intellisense at this point.

KronisLV 19 hours ago

Same! I wonder what other alternatives there might be for autocomplete.

vdfs 17 hours ago

autocomplete is still unlimited within the subscription, maybe using a free model or even cheaper ones are best value..

netule 19 hours ago

If you find out, please let me know!

Seblor571 17 hours ago

Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions remain free with Copilot Pro.

WorldMaker 17 hours ago

But you can no longer amortize annually, which makes it even more a question of "is this worth it this month?" each month. Especially for personal accounts.

WorldMaker 17 hours ago

I'm similarly thinking about sticking with the auto-downgrade back to Copilot Free when the annual sub ends and then just yelling about it any months I hit the 2000 completion cap.

I wouldn't mind a plan between Free and Pro that is just "all I care about is code completion and next edit suggestions".

barrenko 4 hours ago

So it may still be cheaper for us to train junior engineers in the long run.

throwaway85825 10 hours ago

This marks the beginning of the end of the AI free money era. Next they will dramatically raise prices when they have to be profitable on tokens.

2001zhaozhao 8 hours ago

I am seriously considering binge buying local AI inference hardware. The way this is going, there will be another big GPU crunch soon because everyone will need local models and/or open model inference capacity to do their programming tasks when the subsidized subscriptions are no longer flowing.

ThunderSizzle an hour ago

I just bought a 3090 off of Amazon. It was expensive ($1500ish), but covered under prime and an included any reason 90 return policy.

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.

ianhxu 2 hours ago

It's almost impossible to afford the usage-based pricing as a heavy user with multiple max and pro subscriptions. Seems like a bet that same-capability inference will keep getting cheaper on something like a Moore's law curve.

grey-area 19 hours ago

How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?

bityard 19 hours ago

In order to most-to-least charitable, any of:

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.

asdfasgasdgasdg 18 hours ago

Right now there is a cancel and refund button on the Github Copilot annual subscription setting, which I have just pressed.

javawizard 18 hours ago

> 1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire.

They explicitly stated that they won't be doing that: the multipliers go into effect in June for everyone, annual plan or not.

boromisp 19 hours ago

I doubt you can force them to provide the service with the original terms, but you might be able to ask for a (partial) refund. If not today, after a week of verbal abuse they will receive for this online.

yladiz 19 hours ago

It depends where you’re located. In the EU they have to honor the contract you entered, but presumably there is a clause that they can prematurely terminate the contract without cause and give you all of your money back (from the start of the contract).

deaux 17 hours ago

In places with reasonable consumer protections (Australia, Germany) it almost certainly is illegal unless they give a full (whole year) refund. I think the short time limit of applying for a refund won't be looked at favorably either. Regardless of their ToS which I'm sure covers this.

But companies do lots of illegal things, and in general nobody takes them to court over it.

mgrund 19 hours ago

My thought exactly! First the usage limits + model limitations and now fundamental change to the billing. Hope some consumer watchdogs are looking into this!

victorbjorklund 17 hours ago

100% it says in their terms that they can change the service during the agreement.

q3k 16 hours ago

That kind of clause would be void in many places around the world.

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;

victorbjorklund 16 hours ago

drawfloat 18 hours ago

I just checked and you can cancel with a refund.

dist-epoch 19 hours ago

For the yearly plan they only change the model multiplier. And it's in the subscription contract they can change that multiplier at any time.

stego-tech 17 hours ago

It begins.

"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.

deferredgrant 13 hours ago

“Base plan pricing isn’t changing” is technically true, but for anyone using the more capable models heavily, this is still a price increase in all the ways that matter. The old abstraction was hiding compute costs; the new one mostly stops pretending.

throwatdem12311 12 hours ago

“base price isn’t changing”

Why does everyone care about gas prices I only ever pay $20 for gas?

saratogacx 8 hours ago

Shrinkflation

6Az4Mj4D 6 hours ago

Anyone paying enterprise billing can you shed some light how on the earth you will be able to fund this bill going forward?

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.

ktallett 6 hours ago

Surely one path is to return to humans. We can accept that a profit grab to reduce staff numbers to maximise profits, maybe was never the best plan without being in control of the development tool.

alkonaut 3 hours ago

Does this mean that "Let Opus 4.6 churn in a terminal window my whole workday for a fixed price my employer barely notices" was never sustainable?

geomcentral 17 hours ago

I bought a copilot subscription for some small personal projects at Christmas.

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.

0ct0 4 hours ago

Sample of 1 opinion: Massive downgrade for fun vibecoding on the go. Got done much before the recent rate limits on mobile on fun projects, their product went from fun to bad within a few weeks. And now into oblivion I suppose.

alecsm 19 hours ago

So I guess from now on GH Copilot is only worth it if you want a quality autocomplete in VSCode.

Waterluvian 19 hours ago

That was the first thing I turned off in VSCode. Autocomplete for my TypeScript projects was great. And the "AI" suggestions/completions were really getting in the way of me still being the "driver."

0xbadcafebee 9 hours ago

GitHub Copilot has been the most expensive LLM subscription on the internet, when it comes to dollars-per-request-limit. Literally any other subscription provides more usage per dollar. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...

Jayakumark 19 hours ago

Does this mean you can only prompt "Hello" every morning for a month with Opus 4.7 ?

redsaber 19 hours ago

some of Github's open source maintainers have lost their free github copilot pro, guess this is really the next step for them to save cost in their infrastructure.

heikkilevanto 15 hours ago

I started to use github copilot with vscode, but have never been too happy about the system. Over the months I gravitated to much more agentic workstyle, hardly ever editing much code by hand. The vscode IDE was getting more in the way. I had already started to look at OpenCode, and when I found it has a web interface, I was happy to switch over. I use a simple editor (KDE's Kate), or just less to skim through the code and/or a git diff. OpenCode has some free models in it, but I think I will need to get some kind of subscription for a better one. But it won't be copilot any more. The market is moving so fast that I don't know what are the most resonable models, or the most flexible way to set them up so I can switch when prices change yet again.

giancarlostoro 15 hours ago

Check out Zed sometime, its pretty decent too.

kernalix7 11 hours ago

Annual Pro+ subscriber here, mostly using it as a fallback when my Claude Max plan hits limits. The request-based pricing was genuinely the appeal, I could spill over from Max into Copilot without thinking about token costs. Going from 3x to 27x on Opus on annual plans is rough. The newer reasoning models with variable thinking budgets probably made per-request pricing untenable in the long run, but the way this lands on existing annual subscribers feels harsh. Going to look into the prorated refund.

notsylver 13 hours ago

I pay for github copilot solely for completions and use codex for actual agent work. I really wish I could pay like $5/month for just completions or there was a good local alternative for them.

hrpnk 16 hours ago

What's the residual value of Copilot after the changes? For Enterprise plans, even copilot code reviews will be charged at token price + github action minutes for the execution of the review. One can roll one's own reviewer and have it spend the API tokens as well. At least one will be able to select the subset of files for the change set, if needed.

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.

benoau 11 hours ago

> Code completions and Next Edit suggestions remain included in all plans and do not consume AI Credits.

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.

semiquaver 19 hours ago

Whose idea was this “premium request” model anyway? If you’re going to invent a new metric used to bill, why not align it with what, even at the time, was a clear underlying cost structure that GitHub actively chose to ignore for a more confusing system.

kingstnap 19 hours ago

It made more sense in the ye old days where a request was basically just a chat message in a sidebar and it could also edit code. Then saying someone can use 300 chat messages a month kinda makes sense.

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.

DominikPeters 19 hours ago

This approach started with the “Ask a question about your code” feature, which is more comparable to single chat message with relatively predictable token usage. Now it’s an agent who might work for 30 minutes, read the whole codebase, and write 1000 lines

0xffff2 16 hours ago

30 minutes lol. I've gotten Opus to work for a full 8 hour day on one prompt.

Waterluvian 19 hours ago

I'm not usually a Conspiracy Guy, and the answer is probably `incompetence * tech_debt`. But I think that having sufficient layers of abstraction to any billing model is a useful way to hide the real cost of things. It's why it's done everywhere.

lioeters 14 hours ago

In business, if a strategy is making more money, the most direct and usually correct answer is malice, not incompetence.

zihotki 15 hours ago

Looks like Microsoft has run out of compute and can't scale it fast enough to serve copilot users and Azure AI Foundry needs, given that the customer base is growing there as well.

bachmeier 19 hours ago

I'm happy I invested in local solutions and cutting context to the bone for API providers. Claims about AI being able to fully replace programmers never took into account the long-run equilibrium price of inference.

dist-epoch 19 hours ago

Already there are companies paying more for coding tokens than for programmer salaries.

bachmeier 18 hours ago

That's my point. They made those decisions without any consideration for the long run, which would have required them to project the cost of AI services years into the future. Obviously management didn't do that and had no way to do that. It made current earnings look good, though, which was enough for them when they made the decision.

dist-epoch 18 hours ago

xienze 18 hours ago

Doesn't necessarily mean that's a good idea.

mrinterweb 14 hours ago

I only use copilot for the occasional auto-complete suggestion. I'm betting I could run a lightweight local LLM with llama.cpp to get similar functionality. Maybe this would be a decent replacement https://github.com/TabbyML/tabby

mitjam 14 hours ago

I was always curious how they can sustain a request based pricing model when requests can range from tiny to huge with all the modalities GH Copilot offers. Was a steal for agentic coding that turned out to be too good to be true, in the end. Still: Thank you for the ride.

zitterbewegung 15 hours ago

I guess this is the "Google App engine" of Vibe coding when google raised pricing of App Engine significantly after being in preview. Doing weird price changes like this when coming out for new services make much more sense than doing this change which will just anger users.

rob 17 hours ago

According to `bunx ccusage` I'm easily doing $250-400/day in "real" API costs on my $200/month plan. There's no way everybody else isn't going to do the same thing and completely change the industry again. Both beginner and advanced developers are already hooked on all this stuff and they all know it.

Abby_101 18 hours ago

Built credit pricing into my SaaS for AI features and the hardest part wasn't the math, it was that customers can't easily predict their own usage. They underuse and feel cheated, or overuse and churn. Subscriptions hide that volatility from the customer. Usage based pricing makes it their problem, which is honest but harder to sell.

siva7 18 hours ago

We all knew this from the very beginning but couldn't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on their subscription-based pricing strategy. It was nuts except for those few corporations burning investor money to keep competition out as long as possible. Now they don't have to hide anymore that subscription pricing won't do it for ai. The pyramid scheme is falling.

metahost 19 hours ago

Here goes my Copilot Pro subscription then, reluctantly heading over to Codex CLI since the CC base plan is downright unusable.

textech 16 hours ago

I'd be fine with it if they can make Sonnet 4.5 unlimited. I haven't personally seen any major differences between 4.6 or any of the other newer models. Claude 4.5 seems to be the right balance and works great for me.

Ronsenshi 19 hours ago

Just got an email with this announcement.

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.

nine_k 19 hours ago

> rather low compared to what you could use same plan until now.

That's exactly where the subsidy is being removed.

sreekanth850 17 hours ago

The problem is that people expect to get the output of 100 people with a $20 subscription by spawning multiple agents. This is unrealistic. I'm using 2 codex plus account and able to manage a repo with 265-300k lines of code.

pojzon 17 hours ago

The point is - if its the same or more expensive per month than a real human employee - why pay for AI ?

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.

sreekanth850 17 hours ago

How much is the average pay for a junior developer in US? Its definitely much costlier considering PF and other benefits. Just the math. if you use it efficiently it's much cheaper than hiring a permanent staff. You can maintain a lean team and do all the mundane boilerplate coding with AI.

gregjw 6 hours ago

Time to cancel. Happy to hear about some alternatives.

CrzyLngPwd 17 hours ago

In light of this, does anyone have a DGX Spark and use it as a coding agent?

wvenable 18 hours ago

As a Github Copilot user, who mostly just uses chat in the VS Code editor but still burns through my Pro limit every month -- what's the best alternative price to performance? Claude Code?

Gagarin1917 18 hours ago

I keep hearing that Codex is the best bang for your buck now.

hansmayer 5 hours ago

In a way, this is good news. I am expecting to see a lot less of AI-boosters claiming that they are "productive in ways you don't understand", now that they'll have to dish out upwards of a few thousand bucks per month for whatever PoCs they are building. And the excited hired middle managers and CEOs spending other people's money will have to be much more careful about their budget starting June.

hu3 5 hours ago

Nah, they are moving to DeepSeek v4 Pro which is like Sonnet tier for a fraction of the price.

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.

deaux 17 hours ago

"Paid for annual? Tough luck, from now on your usage limits are reduced by 89%. You can do 11% of what you paid for. Good luck if you paid annual a month ago!"

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.

swader999 16 hours ago

This reminds me, I have to cancel co-pilot...

midtake 18 hours ago

Soon it will be cheaper to just do it yourself

izzydata 15 hours ago

It may already be cheaper if you calculate the hidden cost accumulated by LLM generated tech debt. At least some of it could be avoided by manually doing it better to begin with.

imtringued 3 hours ago

I searched for "Show HN" for the first time ever and I got the impression that most of the costs associated with the projects could have been avoided by never starting them to begin with.

"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.

notatoad 15 hours ago

so what's everybody using to get autocompletions in vscode? i've been using copilot just because $10 is cheap, but i use opencode for everything other than completions.

i tried the continue vscode extension, and it seemed kind of janky. are there better options?

referenceo 11 hours ago

Windsurf has free tab complete and has been good for me. Antigravity has free tab complete as well but no idea if its any good

notatoad 10 hours ago

I tried antigravity, it worked great for a couple weeks and then Google changed their rate limits and ruined it - I’d get about 3hrs of work before all the ai features just stopped working.

Aeroi 16 hours ago

from these comments I'm going to make mouse.dev pricing as follows

-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.

everfrustrated 18 hours ago

Why would anyone stay on the Pro+ plan going forward? Pro with openrouter for Opus would be cheaper?

conqrr 13 hours ago

just cancelled mine. Only reason to have it was I could get a lot more done with a single prompt. No reason why I shouldn't go to the model provider directly instead.

Flundstrom2 17 hours ago

It was just a matter of time, considering how many Mtok you could consume in just 300 prompts.

whatsthatabout 18 hours ago

So what's the best alternative now? Openrouter + cline or something else?

slipwalker 17 hours ago

i like opencode's zen https://opencode.ai/en/zen with opencode's TUI.

tomaskafka 15 hours ago

Well, the free launch for somebody else's money is over.

XYen0n 8 hours ago

Amp Free provides $10 free credits every day. Unfortunately, new applications have now been closed.

twistedcheeslet 19 hours ago

End of an era for predictable costs as a small business. We will refer to these times as ‘the good old days’.

wombatpm 18 hours ago

I expect the prices to rise to almost cover the cost savings from layoffs at large companies.

upcoming-sesame 15 hours ago

what's the best place to transition to on a company level after this change ? should companies just switch to pay as you go with open router ?

throwa356262 4 hours ago

Now do the same thing with the office 365 subscriptions.

That is, redact copilot from the bill for customers that dont use it.

miroljub 19 hours ago

This subsidized inference is just a marketing ploy to increase prices and profit.

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.

gibsonsmog 17 hours ago

Yeah, local is clearly the future. Even beyond the cheap Chinese models you can install the apfel[1] stuff if you're on a mac and want a quick available onboard cli option. And I'm sure people will adapt the Flash-MoE[2] integration to be even better soon as well.

[1] https://apfel.franzai.com/ [2] https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe

ReptileMan 19 hours ago

I really don't understand why OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft are in competition to see which one of the three will elevate deepseek the most.

dist-epoch 19 hours ago

DeepSeek will do the same thing.

Z/Mimo already raised their prices multiple times since the promotional prices at the start of the year.

phainopepla2 15 hours ago

DeepSeek (and other open weight models) can be served by anyone with the means to do it. All of the big open weight models are available on OpenRouter via commodity providers.

slopinthebag 17 hours ago

DeepSeek is actually more expensive than expected ATM due to compute shortage, but they said it would come down in price.

dist-epoch 17 hours ago

herrj 19 hours ago

cursor, windsurf, and CC are all already on usage-based models so I guess what really matters is whether Copilot's GitHub integration depth justifies the price per token vs the alternatives

talideon 16 hours ago

And so it begins...

synergy20 17 hours ago

haven't touched copilot for one year, this reminds me to cancel, it will take sometime to catch up

speedgoose 19 hours ago

So about a month left before cancelling. Got it.

fortran77 18 hours ago

I'm not sure I understand this. All I know is now, I pay $39/month (actually less because I paid a year up front), use the agent, mostly on auto--and only choosing a model if it got stuck or in a loop--every day, and haven't hit any limits yet. It seemed to good to be true, after hearing others talk of $300/month bills. I guess it was.

tgrowazay 11 hours ago

$10/month was a too good of a deal.

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.

insane_dreamer 17 hours ago

Glad this was announced because I didn't even realize that our (small) team has been paying $20/month for Github Copilot when none of us are using it, so used the opportunity to cancel CoPilot altogether. I think it was free when I first activated it (this was also before Claude, Codex, Gemini, and while not that great, it was why not), and didn't realize it had switched to paid and bundled with our Github bill, and now per usage.

dude250711 19 hours ago

Which one is it:

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.

gpm 19 hours ago

Re 1: Current models don't solve coding. They are useful tool for it though.

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.

to11mtm 19 hours ago

... Once again the Business accounts get all sorts of goodwill [0] and users get the shaft.

[0] - Last weeks changes limited my personal Copilot Pro account but not my Work one

ValentineC 18 hours ago

What "goodwill"? It's just more "AI credits" for what will be a shit product in June.

thinkingtoilet 19 hours ago

People need to wake up and stop being surprised by these billing increases. I see it on every update of every model. This was all subsidized by VC and company money. Now they need a return and the prices will keep going up. Be glad that you took advantage of that up until now, but can we stop the pearl clutching when we all know the amount of money being dumped into AI and the lackluster returns?

minimaxir 19 hours ago

It's less surprise, but more confusing given the game theory as their competitors are not doing the same thing and the multiplier changes alone will likely churn current users.

p1necone 8 hours ago

Their competitors aren't doing the same thing because none of their competitors had the same broken 'pay per request' pricing model.

thinkingtoilet 15 hours ago

AI companies are increasing prices across the board.

exidex 17 hours ago

"The bottom line" is the new "Its not just X, its Y"

hkon 15 hours ago

Github Copilot has for the last week been an absolute shitshow. Clearly something has happened behind the scenes.

AI itself clearly weaker / dumber. Prices increased manyfold.

fridder 17 hours ago

aaaand another github outage today. FFS

silverwind 19 hours ago

TLDR: It's a 6-9x price increase

timxtokyo 6 hours ago

yes...need to move to api usage, that a huge jump after getting everyone onboard

immanuwell 19 hours ago

tldr: people were running multi-hour agentic coding sessions for the same flat fee as a one-liner autocomplete, github was eating the bill, and that party's over on june 1st

WhereIsTheTruth 17 hours ago

Still no chips coming from Microslop

Google won