Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

github.blog

301–310 of 583 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#301
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…

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!

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Where else is a one year old technology already hopelessly outdated? 10 years ago is basically stone age.

I am continually tripped out by the fact when I was 16, I didn't have a 'smartphone' beyond a Windows Mobile 6 phone that had no internet on it. Now, I have this high-resolution shiny object that can near instantaneously get any information I want along with _streaming HD video to it_ *anywhere*. 15 years even feels like a stone age. I can't fathom what it has to feel like people in their 60s and 70s.

I'm not quite 60, but it's always interesting to me that I feel quite the opposite of this. When I was 16, I didn't have a computer, didn't have a phone, had never used the Internet, but when I think of how life has changed, it's frankly not much. I woke up this morning, scooped my cats' litter boxes, took out some trash, made myself breakfast, ate that, read some news while eating, then lifted weights in my garage, had some work meetings, wrote up some instructions per a customer request from Friday, and am about to go drive to the lake to go do a 9 mile longboard loop.

That's very close to a normal day in 1996. The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper. The news was not any more interesting or informative because of that. I guess I can also still do the loop reasonably well, but I'm a lot slower than I was in 1996 when I was a cross-country state champion.

My parents are closing in on 70 and I guess I can't speak for them, but I'm at least aware of the daily routines of their lives, too. Walk the dog, do housework, DIY building projects, visit kids and grankids. Seems much the same, too, with the biggest difference being they're now teaching my sister's sons to play baseball rather than me, but shit, one of her sons even looks like exactly the same way I looked when I was 7! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#303
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…

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

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#304
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.

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.

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#305
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Enterprise sales will be the answer. Microsoft will have some story that convinces an exec eight levels up the org chart from the normal users that this is an essential product they need to overpay for. Given their existing relationshipsand immense sales team they'll probably have success.

That story is data governance. Corporate already have a data-agreement with MS, storing all their data there. Github copilot is covered by that, while a individual agreement with e.g. anthropic needs lawers involved.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#306
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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, [..]

They do?? I was under the impression I was just playing the price for whatever provider they deemed 'best' for each completion.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#307
post #29

"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!"

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.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#308

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…

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

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#309

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…

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

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

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#310
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 contra…

Let’s see if German users can enforce it or not.
Post reply on HN