Did you compare the cost of using a GPT plus subscription and use GPT by API?

Honestly, I find most of the value I get from copilot in VScode is it's strong autocomplete. It's really good at recognizing sequences. I generally prefer to use a web based chatbot to actually write code.

Generally though, I feel that the cost of AI is cheap relative to the value and my time is expensive and I have a bunch of different subscriptions and perplexity is currently the best for research and claude or chatgpt are the best for writing email and copilot is just awesome for coding autocompletion. I just write a comment and it writes all the code.

It's more expensive with out a doubt although I don't have the exact numbers, but there is also a huge advantage to it that is volumen of content that you can send and control over the system message. At the end, and this is only my case, I'm using both the premium for short problems and the API for more complex ones.