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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

#271

Post by recitedropper »

deaux wrote: post #232
recitedropper wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Streaming, caching, and tool calling can get pretty expensive with scale, even when you don't touch inference. Maybe they're doing something clever and are quite profitable.. or maybe they've already taken $40mm from VCs and are currently trying to raise $120mm at a 1.3B evaluation.

They also show headline prices for the cheapest provider of whatever model, but then need to hit different backends some of which may be more expensive. For now they absorb those costs, but the VCs always come knocking.

Just my opinion though. Totally agreed that they have one of the best positions amongst all AI providers from a financial standpoint.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#272

Post by cbovis »

kristjansson wrote: post #100
everfrustrated wrote: post #20

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

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).

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#273

Post by redsaber »

gpm wrote: post #170
theanonymousone wrote: post #162

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...

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.

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

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#274

Post by flir »

bluescrn wrote: post #202
giwook wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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-mo…

I do. "Commoditize your complement". Want to sell lots of silicon? Give away good local models to run on that silicon.

Even if SOTA models in the cloud are a few percentage points better, most work can be routed to local models most of the time. That leaves the cloud providers fighting over the most computationally intensive tasks. In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first.

(Unless providers can figure out a network effect that local models can't replicate).

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#275

Post by 0xffff2 »

postalcoder wrote: post #61

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.

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#276

Post by tjoff »

altmanaltman wrote: post #119
nacs wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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

... that is exactly what they will do. Just click the link in this thread, or read the headline.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#277

Post by Aeroi »

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#278

Post by satvikpendem »

c-hendricks wrote: post #214
drumttocs8 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing how much I was able to build for $40/mo- something that would have taken a team of 100 twice the time just a few years ago. Will always be grateful for the greed of trillion dollar corporations that subsidized me.

I'm starting to see comments like this in a new light after using some primarily AI-coded apps the past few weeks. They are a lot like apps that were built by hundreds of developers/product people over years and years, in the worst ways. Inconsistent design patterns from page to page, half baked features, inconsistent documentation (but BOY is there ever a lot of it!), NIH ui component libraries that don't act like y…

True but they wouldn't have existed otherwise. If they're end user apps, users generally don't care about the code because they never see it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#279

Post by rwyinuse »

bluescrn wrote: post #202
giwook wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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-mo…

"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."

Based on what exactly? So far every time OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever has released a new top performing model, competitors have caught up quickly. Open source models have greatly improved as well.

I expect AI to be just like cloud computing in general - AWS, Azure, GCP being the main providers, with dozens of smaller competitors offering similar services as well.

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