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GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

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Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#241

Post by deaux »

t-sauer wrote: post #97
minimaxir wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Those multipliers will only apply if you are currently on an annual subscription (and only until your renewal comes up or you cancel). So I assume they simply want to make it as unattractive as possible to get most people to cancel it and move to the token based system.

That's not an answer. It's specifically a discrepancy between 5.4 and 5.4-mini. If you look at all other models/generations you see that the cheaper model indeed has a lower multiplier. It's very strange that only 5.4 doesn't have this.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#242

Post by easton »

Someone1234 wrote: post #90
to11mtm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, I missed that. 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?

It forces you to pay at least $20 in tokens per user even for people who use less (they probably have stats on how many people use just autocomplete, which doesn’t count against the quota. or have a seat and don’t use the service at all).

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#245

Post by Latty »

nickjj wrote: post #74

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 wi…

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#246

Post by deaux »

kanemcgrath wrote: post #200
cyanydeez wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Have you tried the latest Gemma? You might prefer it to Qwen, depending on what you're doing.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#247

Post by fomoz »

hakunin wrote: post #157

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 wort…

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#248

Post by 0xffff2 »

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#249

Post by ctoth »

croes wrote: post #139
dualvariable wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I guess the new models will still be quantum leaps, but literally: "The smallest possible change in a system"

Yups... Mythos is the smallest possible leap. Not a standard model generation advance, not even a version point advance. Just the smallest possible quanta of a change. We are absolutely hitting a plateau any day now. Any day. Any time. Any second now. Yup. Right now! Surely!

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#250

Post by SeriousM »

Squarex wrote: post #168
hakunin wrote: post #157

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 wort…

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

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