How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?
I just checked and you can cancel with a refund.
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
111–120 of 583 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#112I 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
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Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#113The 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.
That's so unfair to us hard working developers. A month ago i could buy for .4$ a turn with Sonnet. Now i have to pay at least .9$ for this turn. Weeks ago i could buy for .12$ an Opus turn after they already raised prices and now they want .27$ from me for the same product! They are stealing from us!
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#114Windsurf made a similar change in March: https://docs.windsurf.com/windsurf/accounts/quota > In March 2026, Windsurf replaced the credit-based system with a quota-based usage system. Instead of buying and spending credits, your plan now includes a daily and weekly usage allowance that refreshes automatically. With hindsight, per-request pricing makes no sense at all if an agent can burn a widely varying amount of tok…
per-request was broken, yeah. but $10 of monthly credits is basically just a prepaid wallet with a reset timer.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#115Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#116... Once again the Business accounts get all sorts of goodwill [0] and users get the shaft. [0] - Last weeks changes limited my personal Copilot Pro account but not my Work one
What "goodwill"? It's just more "AI credits" for what will be a shit product in June.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#117I 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 tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#118The 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.
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…
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 a datacenter and fill it up with open source DeepSeek inference and undercut your prices by 10x while still making a very good ROI--and that's a business model right there. Right now I'm sure there's a lot of people who will protest that they couldn't do their jobs with lesser models, but as time goes on that will get less and less. Already right now the consumers who are using AI for writing presentations, cooking recipe generation and ELI5 answers for common things, aren't going to be missing much from a lesser model. That'll actually only start to get cheaper over time.
Also for business needs, as AI inference costs escalate there comes a point where businesses rediscover human intelligence again, and start hiring/training people to do more work to use lesser models--if that is more productive in the end than shelling out large amounts of cash for inference on the latest models. [Although given how much companies waste on AWS, there's a lot of tolerance for overspending in corporations...]
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#119The 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.
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
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#120How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?
In order to most-to-least charitable, any of: 1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire. 2. Github could offer, or the user could request, a pro-rated refund along with cancellation of the account. 3. Tough luck, those users agreed that Github could unilaterally change the ToS at any time.
> 1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire.
They explicitly stated that they won't be doing that: the multipliers go into effect in June for everyone, annual plan or not.