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GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

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51–60 of 583 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#52
post #5

"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?

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

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#53

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

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#55

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.

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#56

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

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#57
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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#58
post #5

"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?

Are you thinking something like rollover plans?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#60
post #4

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.

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

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