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GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

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331–340 of 583 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#331
post #174

What's the current situation for coding with Local LLM's on decent hardware? I have an M3 Max with 64 gb of ram and am thinking I should start looking at Ollama and Opencode? Is this a useful stack for smaller personal projects?

Use llama.cpp or better yet Unsloth Studio

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#332
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've been using it for a few months because Copilot was the only AI blessed by our corporate overlords. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code, which I've used extensively on personal projects. However CC was recently approved, and I'm betting that with these changes to Copilot pricing we'll end up dropping it like a hot potato.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#333
post #305
post #290

Earlier 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.

Microsoft is simply the default answer for most large corporations. Getting access to some Microsoft subscription is very easy, because of the existing framework agreements, Microsoft providing any and all compliance slopuments needed and already being pre-cleared for corporate data etc. Meanwhile trying to use another provider (e.g. Anthropic) would be a one year endeavor, minimum.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#334
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow thats a lot for routing traffic.

Payment processing likely eats up at least 2-3% of that

IIRC OpenRouter charges you for the payment processing fee also.

Still worth it IMO to be able to switch from Provider A to Provider B if Provider A is having a bad day.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#335

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.

I'm already on Pro. Why should I keep it?

e.g. if on an annual plan? 0x will be gone, but there are okay 1x and 0.3x models left. I am pretty much curious how the early may test invoicing will look like. current setup of tools etc. is way too chatty eats up 1+M token per PRU easily. not sure how much is cached.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#337
post #241
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those multipliers will only apply if you are currently on an annual subscription (and only until your renewal comes up or you cancel). So I assume they simply want to make it as unattractive as possible to get most people to cancel it and move to the token based system.

That's not an answer. It's specifically a discrepancy between 5.4 and 5.4-mini. If you look at all other models/generations you see that the cheaper model indeed has a lower multiplier. It's very strange that only 5.4 doesn't have this.

both 5.4 were best bang (-mini even more as I found it usually same well performing!!!) for the buck before. Now they face cost reality it seems.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#338
I started to use github copilot with vscode, but have never been too happy about the system. Over the months I gravitated to much more agentic workstyle, hardly ever editing much code by hand. The vscode IDE was getting more in the way. I had already started to look at OpenCode, and when I found it has a web interface, I was happy to switch over. I use a simple editor (KDE's Kate), or just less to skim through the code and/or a git diff. OpenCode has some free models in it, but I think I will need to get some kind of subscription for a better one. But it won't be copilot any more. The market is moving so fast that I don't know what are the most resonable models, or the most flexible way to set them up so I can switch when prices change yet again.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#340
They're not the only ones in the AI sphere to wind back, but they're the weirdest case in my eyes. Microsoft invests in having engineers building open models and they don't use a single one. I really don't get it.

But what really surprised me most about Copilot is that it would bill you per question, nothing about tokens. So if I managed to produce a prompt that gave me back an insane amount of tokens for something, which using any Claude model would easily accomplish, you were giving me my money's worth, at your own expense. The math is not gonna math out forever.

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