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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

#371

Post by gavmor »

boc wrote: post #96
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 just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7

claude/gemini/crush inside of agent-of-empires inside of ghostty in one window, and zed in the other for touch-ups.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#372

Post by user34283 »

rurp wrote: post #290
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #210

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.

We also pay $300/month for Azure Desktop VMs.

We are paying for tens of thousands of those machines, although everyone knows they are stupidly expensive and incredibly slow.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#373

Post by LtWorf »

vanviegen wrote: post #299
flir wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

> In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first. Why? There's an inherent efficiency advantage to scale, while the only real advantage for local models (privacy/secrecy) hasn't proven convincing for broader IT either.

To not depend on an external company that can decide the price.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#374

Post by munk-a »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #210
everfrustrated wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking the same. Downgrade to Pro and use OpenRouter (same price) for overage. Seems a massive loss for Microsoft. Presumably there's a further rugpull to come.

> 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.

They list the price 900% higher and give a 90% discount to enterprises who also use teams, outlook, office or even windows if they're desperate. Then that becomes a deal so good that enterprises can't afford not to take it!

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#375

Post by johndough »

vanviegen wrote: post #304
johndough wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> More powerful models can do a lot more work (consuming a lot more tokens) per prompt.

That is not my experience. Each model since at least GPT-4 can fill up an entire context window. In fact, more powerful models can solve tasks faster, so their ratio of multiplier to API price should decrease, not increase.

For example, Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a multiplier of 9 and an API price of $15, which is 0.6 multiplier per dollar.

Claude Opus 4.7 has an API price of $25, so it should have a multiplier of 25 * 0.6 = 15 when extrapolating from Sonnet, but the multiplier is 27.

> Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.

That might be it. Is there any data on this somewhere?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#376

Post by to11mtm »

easton wrote: post #242
Someone1234 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You can get at least at baseline vague stats but from what I have seen it is more account than user focused, i.e. 'X number of users used %feature%' and/or '%model% was X percent of requests per day'.

That said it's worth noting, I don't see how anything they expose will reliably help orgs plan costing from what AFAIK is in fact a big shift for billing/costing planning.

> It forces you to pay at least $20

For better or worse that's public pricing, i.e. if you are coming in also negotiating VS for devs, windows/office licenses for the rest of the business and stuff like Azure Devops... a lot of their stuff gets cheaper if your company's IT procurement group is vaguely competent at negotiating. Not even talking bigcorp here I'm talking 500-1000 employee range.

Of course, very small orgs will suffer, but it does tie in with the theme over the last two weeks; anyone with a personal account is basically subsidizing the credits for the business accounts during the transition period.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#377

Post by Gigachad »

hirako2000 wrote: post #198
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…

It does feel like the music is about to stop. It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.

This is the best AI programming will be. From here on the enshitification starts and the prices go up.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#378

Post by Gigachad »

stefan_ wrote: post #330
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…

Dunno, if in this day and age you are making inference more expensive, more scarce, you are honestly moving in the wrong direction and DeepSeek and others will gladly take your lunch.

The hardware to run deepseek is still incredibly expensive.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#379

Post by madamelic »

nonameiguess wrote: post #302
madamelic wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Thank you for this insight!

I always wonder the views of older people. My parents are very technology forward and have been my entire life so it is difficult to gauge how different life is compared to when they were growing up.

It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!" and see as distinct from having 'unlimited' resources and the internet.

Your insight is good ("The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper") that life sort of stays the same but the modality changes. People still go to the store like they did in the mid-1800s but now it is by car.

I wonder what our "industrial revolution" will be where the previous generation lived (ie: out in the country on a farm) totally different lives to the current (ie: in the city in a factory). Maybe when space travel and multi-planetary living is normalized?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#380

Post by ValentineC »

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.

> 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.

The 5% fee probably has to factor in Stripe's fees, which would be around 3% to 4% depending on whether it's an international card.

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