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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

#261

Post by 0xffff2 »

vizzier wrote: post #152
gigiogigione wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They now also own xAI

Which in turn owns Twitter. SpaceX is now a social media company in addition to a rocket company.

One theory I think Matt Levine posited, is that SpaceX will go public with dual-class stock that gives Elon control even with a minority ownership stake, and will subsequently buy Tesla, which doesn't have dual class stock, making SpaceX the singular "Elon Musk company", with him having operational control despite being public.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#262

Post by daemonologist »

0xffff2 wrote: post #248

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…

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#263

Post by 0xffff2 »

sefrost wrote: post #25

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

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?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#264

Post by swiftcoder »

gruez wrote: post #259
ffsm8 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement

>but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code? Otherwise to pay 5.5% on all your tokens just so it's slightly easier to swap providers (ie. changing a few urls?)

> Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code?

Yep, you can plug deepseek/kimi/minimax into claude code just fine. Or run everything through another harness like opencode instead.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#265

Post by veb »

0xffff2 wrote: post #248

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…

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#266

Post by captainbland »

cedws wrote: post #91
999900000999 wrote: post #17

Well. Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot. "To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare." Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.

Seems like a strong signal the money burning party is coming to a close. Nearly all AI companies have tightened their belts in the past month. Anthropic removed Claude Code from the Pro plan, Z.AI increased their prices, GitHub removed some Claude models from Copilot, now this. Also, Opus 4.7 seems like a model more intended to save Anthropic money than push the bar.

Yeah, honestly it feels like this came faster than I was expecting. I thought we'd see another few years of reeling in with too-good-to-be-true prices to really lock in dependency but it feels like most companies have kind of a lot of wiggle room to back out of this still

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#267

Post by hakunin »

fomoz wrote: post #247
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.

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#268

Post by cubefox »

ctoth wrote: post #249
croes wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yeah. AI progress is insanely fast if you compare it to anything else. Where else is a one year old technology already hopelessly outdated? 10 years ago is basically stone age.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#269

Post by kanemcgrath »

deaux wrote: post #246
kanemcgrath wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I did, but in almost everything I tried even qwen3.5 was better, and 3.6 was a huge step up.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#270

Post by bootsmann »

geodel wrote: post #166
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…

> 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- Not sure how it all works out. Currently trillion dollar companies can't make a native app for platforms. Everything is just JS/Electron because economics does not work for them. And here companies can make GW data center running very expensive GPUs…

The price you pay for anthropic must include the price of training new and better models which is incredibly costly. If you use the models someone else already spend money to develop you don’t need to pay this price.
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