End of an era for predictable costs as a small business. We will refer to these times as ‘the good old days’.
I expect the prices to rise to almost cover the cost savings from layoffs at large companies.
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
141–150 of 583 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#142The 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!
The already stole when they trained their models on the data.
Now they just increase the price to buy it back
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#143Windsurf 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…
I wouldn't call it hindsight - I don't think anyone, at any stage, thought running a 10 minute+ sonnet session for 1 premium credit was ever profitable. We all knew it was a loss leader to get people using it.
It would have been profitable if that premium credit cost more than a negotiated discounted rate with Anthropic. We have no way of knowing if there were negotiated rates though!
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#144Earlier 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/$200 a month was never meant to…
However, inference costs for entirely good enough models are likely to keep declining in the future. We're probably hitting diminishing returns on model size and training. The new generations aren't quantum leaps anymore, and newer generations of open source models like DeepSeek are likely to start getting good enough. There's going to be a limit to how much they can raise prices, because someone can always build out…
I think so too.
And at some point even frontier model costs will hopefully come down (if there is still a meaningful difference between closed and open source models at that point) as all of the compute that's being built out right now comes online.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#145The era of subsidised inference is truly ending. The new model multipliers ( https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing... ) seem like a huge leap, though. From 1x to 6x for new-ish GPT and Sonnet models. 27x for Opus... Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.
That's so unfair to us hard working developers. A month ago i could buy for .4$ 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!
They aren't stealing from us, for several reasons. First of all, it's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like the prices, use something else. Or don't use AI at all.
Second, you have no idea what their costs are. It is most likely that they are simply passing on their costs to you. If that was not the setup, users would just go to another service provider who was providing tokens at a cheaper rate. It's not like there is a dearth of competitors in this business.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#146Well. Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot. "To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare." Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.
Link to the announcement for anyone else like me who hasn't gotten the email yet: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo... Not really sure why I would stick with Copilot after this, and increasing Sonnet from 1x to 9x for annual subscribers is highway fucking robbery. Very glad I didn't commit myself to an annual plan.
What does that mean? That copilot users can use 1/9th of their prior usage of Sonnet?
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#147"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!"
On top of being worth less, the subscriber discounts are gone.
The old plans were $0.033/request for Pro, $0.026/request for Pro+ and $0.04/request for pay-as-you-go. That discount is now gone. They even still advertise "5x the number of requests" for Pro+ over Pro.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, totally. The recent pricing changes have just made my Copilot subscription go from great deal to awful value over night. I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.
Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.
But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#149Built credit pricing into my SaaS for AI features and the hardest part wasn't the math, it was that customers can't easily predict their own usage. They underuse and feel cheated, or overuse and churn. Subscriptions hide that volatility from the customer. Usage based pricing makes it their problem, which is honest but harder to sell.
We all knew this from the very beginning but couldn't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on their subscription-based pricing strategy. It was nuts except for those few corporations burning investor money to keep competition out as long as possible. Now they don't have to hide anymore that subscription pricing won't do it for ai. The pyramid scheme is falling.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#150"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!"
More like, the rising gas prices aren’t a problem, I only ever fill up for $40