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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

#351

Post by pverheggen »

mdesq wrote: post #342
theanonymousone wrote: post #162

Something is hilariously off here: Why should I pay $10 and be forced to use it by the end of the month, while I can pay $10 and have it last as long as I want? Their "API pricing" is exactly the same as that of providers: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

I have to wonder if it's because of how many Enterprise customers they have who have standardized on Github Copilot and gotten it through the gauntlet of legal approvals etc.

This rings true to me as someone who's worked at a few large corps like this. A price hike does not change things when there is a mandate to use MS products over other vendors.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#352

Post by mitjam »

I was always curious how they can sustain a request based pricing model when requests can range from tiny to huge with all the modalities GH Copilot offers. Was a steal for agentic coding that turned out to be too good to be true, in the end. Still: Thank you for the ride.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#353

Post by themafia »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #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,…

> I really don't get it.

One of the largest employers publicly engaging in a project which has the outcome of depressing wages. It's easier to "get" if you don't take the trillion dollar gorilla at face value.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#355

Post by mitjam »

nacs wrote: post #31
my002 wrote: post #4

The 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.

I understand it like : the 10 usd is for handling the business record, maybe also the harness, I get a few coins to kick tires, but to use it for anything real it’s pay as you go by the tokens list price.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#356

Post by junto »

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

Quite honestly I love the GitHub Copilot CLI. I pair it with Squad and it’s awesome.

https://bradygaster.github.io/squad/

If I have the same repo also open in VSCode, it’s also aware of that fact, so you can give it context (a file or selected lines of code).

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#357

Post by cyanydeez »

simonw wrote: post #234
cyanydeez wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guys, you're discussing a house of cards to begin with: No matter how you're paying for the $CURRENTSOTA you're not garunteed that next month what you pay for will be the same. So, lets do some honest evaluations: 1. The model itself is a non-deterministic engine of work with an unknown value; it's real value is just magic. 2. The business model itself is non-deterministic engine of profit with a known value; whateve…

The problem with assuming that tokens can only get more expensive is that the Chinese open weight LLM firms have dropped models which have a known, fixed price that can never get more expensive (since we can run them on hardware we own).

Well, I guess we're not discussing the same thing. The cost of cloud tokens are going to go up. They won't ever be cheaper. They're generating far more tokens than my AMD 395+ w/128GB at a much cheaper rate.

I agree though, it can't get cheaper than the cost of hardware it's just without sufficient documentation of the actual costs to run the cloud models, we can't really know what the "true" cost of each token is. I assume there's an economist out there somewhere that could figure it out though. Certainly, the cost should approach at a minimum a open weights model running on a local machine.

I've succesffully got Qwen3-coder-next to loop and generate sufficiently competent code and from what I can tell, the difference between this and the cloth is how quickly the gen happens and perhas how interactive it has to be.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#358

Post by herpdyderp »

0xffff2 wrote: post #309
herpdyderp wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to feel exactly like you do, but now I use the Claude CLI exclusively and am very pleased with the results.

Could you elaborate on what's better about the CLI?

Simply the output of the code written. It initially worried me that it was harder to add context (can't select a single line of code in VS Code and automatically attach it, for example), but I've found that the Claude CLI's output is so far superior that it doesn't even need that VS Code context.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#359

Post by AntiUSAbah »

boothby wrote: post #206
AntiUSAbah wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can only reel you in if its worth it. I still can code. And while i do not spend 200$ privat, in my startup we discussed this and our current mental model is, that instead of hiring someone new, we prefer to have more money for tokens. This is easier for us and has a bigger benefit. The cost of a new / first employee is very high, a 200$ subscription is not. Upgrading that to lets say 400 or 800$ is still alot e…

I'm looking at education -- teachers and students, not terribly tech savvy, are being mandated to use these tools. And then comes the rug-pull. It was worth it, but now it's outside of their budget. Poorer schools / students can't stay at the cutting edge; richer schools / students can.

You still get far with 20$ if you don't use it daily for lots of coding and thinking though.

And Gemma 4 and other open models can easily be hosted even for schools.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#360

Post by fooey »

theanonymousone wrote: post #162

Something is hilariously off here: Why should I pay $10 and be forced to use it by the end of the month, while I can pay $10 and have it last as long as I want? Their "API pricing" is exactly the same as that of providers: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...

for my experience currently, I greatly prefer the VSCode Copilot extension experience over the Claude Extension

I think VSCode only supports copilot for "autocomplete" too

on top of that, you need GitHub Copilot for the PR reviewer functionality in GitHub

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