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
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
311–320 of 583 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#312Earlier 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…
Yes, a lot of people (not me). Why? Well because that was the whole value proposition of these companies, relentlessly pushed by their PR and most of the media- rememmber it was something something Pocket PhDs, massive unemployment etc?
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#315I wonder if GitHub (Microsoft) is implicitly betting that enterprise demand is sticky enough to absorb these rates, especially given that Opus 4.6 “fast” was being listed at a 27x multiplier. Maybe they saw enough usage at that price point to conclude the demand is real. Or maybe the strategy is to keep the enterprise customers who can justify it while shedding heavier individual and power-user usage. The interesting…
It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Checking now: The way they describe it in their FAQ is that if the price changes, then they will bill you the new price. But I read that as regarding if the primary model provider changes their headline token cost; not in the case of pricing differences for models that have many different backends that host them.
Regardless, I would be more concerned about the streaming costs if the service continues to blow up and they scale aggressively through VC investments. If their 5.5% skim accounted for what they needed, you'd think they could effectively grow organically..
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#317I 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
Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#318Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#319"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!"
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#320I wonder if GitHub (Microsoft) is implicitly betting that enterprise demand is sticky enough to absorb these rates, especially given that Opus 4.6 “fast” was being listed at a 27x multiplier. Maybe they saw enough usage at that price point to conclude the demand is real. Or maybe the strategy is to keep the enterprise customers who can justify it while shedding heavier individual and power-user usage. The interesting…
I also suspect that there are many "slow-moving", Microsoft heavy enterprises but with in-house devs that can't get anything but Copilot approved, and Microsoft trusts this will remain so. It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.
Additionally, we got copilot for every user, including those that never write code or use AI tools.