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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

#361

Post by mitjam »

Mattwmaster58 wrote: post #98
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.

FYI, these are the multipliers for annual plan. I would hazard a guess most people are not on an annual plan

I am and I see it as stopping the music at a party when you want everyone to go home without telling them to go home. There is also the offer to quit with prorated refund for the remaining time. I think I am going to take it.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#362

Post by MattBDev »

lexone wrote: post #300
hrpnk wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the multipliers then at all?

The multipliers are there only for current annual plan customers. After 2026 its all tokens.

I thought I was smart for buying the annual plan after I graduated and lost my student plan and then GitHub taking away my Copilot Pro I got for free for being a author of a popular OSS project. Turns out I'm being punished for making that year commitment to them. I like to think I'm only a moderate user of GHCP so this is just terrible for me. I'm honestly thinking about cancelling and switching to alternatives while also looking at investing in a local LLM setup.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#363

Post by robertkarl »

brushfoot wrote: post #223
cyanydeez wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're a candidate for a local model. It's kinda nice not caring what the token count means except as to compaction.

Not paying per token? Not sending my code to someone else's servers for inference? That's the stuff of sweet dreams for a stingy, paranoid solopreneur like me. If I could run a local model comparable to even Sonnet 4.6 without shelling out $50K in hardware, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But all I have is a 32 GB of RAM and an old RTX 4080. Or am I not up to speed? Are there decent coding models that can run on dev laptop…

I am trying to figure this out too... what I am seeing is that the local models like Qwen 3.5 family that fit on hardware like yours handle ambiguity poorly. But are capable of emitting complete apps too.

That, and they have tool use issues.... https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1smzw6s/qwen35_a3...

I would check out the model mentioned in that thread, GGUF unsloth/qwen3.5-35b-a3b on Q4_K_M

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#364

Post by johndough »

hakunin wrote: post #157

Everybody who says it's a 5-9-27x seems to not be aware of the obvious loophole. More like 50x increase. You were able to use over $500 worth of Opus on a $10/mo Github plan easily, no hacks. You could just prompt "plan this out for me, don't stop until fully planned, don't ask any questions", and you would get ~$5 worth of planning in one 3x request. At 100 requests/mo, each easily reaching $5, that's easy $500 wort…

That was not my experience. When I tried to use Opus for longer tasks with Copilot, it would fill up the context completely and then crash without any output, while still consuming premium requests. (At least from September 2025 to January this year. Haven't tried after that.)

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#365

Post by solid_fuel »

vanviegen wrote: post #299
flir wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do. "Commoditize your complement". Want to sell lots of silicon? Give away good local models to run on that silicon. Even if SOTA models in the cloud are a few percentage points better, most work can be routed to local models most of the time. That leaves the cloud providers fighting over the most computationally intensive tasks. In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first. (Unless providers can fi…

> In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first. Why? There's an inherent efficiency advantage to scale, while the only real advantage for local models (privacy/secrecy) hasn't proven convincing for broader IT either.

Local first models aren't just more private than the API vendors, they also have the advantages of fixed cost, lower latency, and better stability - local models don't get nerfed/"updated" in the background like chatgpt does.

Maybe in a world where these AI companies behaved with some semblance of ethics and user-friendliness they would be on even ground, but for anyone paying attention local models are obviously the future.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#366

Post by hirako2000 »

stuartq wrote: post #323
ctoth wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been years now of reading this same comment... Surely people can't keep typing it forever.

But the prices haven't been going up by multiples of 6 for the past few years. Things are actually changing now. I don't think it's over, but in the short term, it's going to be considerably more expensive.

They will smooth up the spike. Or be subtle and transform the existing quota so that they run out more quickly. Calling it caching, compression, optimisation, of course for the sacred benefit of the users.

That would be, even is, the smart thing to do.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#367

Post by hakunin »

johndough wrote: post #364
hakunin wrote: post #157

Everybody who says it's a 5-9-27x seems to not be aware of the obvious loophole. More like 50x increase. You were able to use over $500 worth of Opus on a $10/mo Github plan easily, no hacks. You could just prompt "plan this out for me, don't stop until fully planned, don't ask any questions", and you would get ~$5 worth of planning in one 3x request. At 100 requests/mo, each easily reaching $5, that's easy $500 wort…

That was not my experience. When I tried to use Opus for longer tasks with Copilot, it would fill up the context completely and then crash without any output, while still consuming premium requests. (At least from September 2025 to January this year. Haven't tried after that.)

On pi coding agent, it worked very well for me over the past few months, but started glitching more recently, just prior to this announcement.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#369

Post by 2ndorderthought »

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.

I don't know if it's just me but copilot kind of sucks. I've been running local models with like 9b parameters and they are about as good if not better. Obviously there's no integrations or whatever and I get most people are probably paying for that than anything else but eh. Big no thanks from me.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#370

Post by cityofdelusion »

fooey wrote: post #360
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

Huh, I find my copilot plugin to be so incredibly glitchy. My agents are always reporting that their shells are mangled that commands are truncated and all kinds of nonsense. Sometimes they spin up dev servers fine other times it just hangs waiting for a terminal response. So far I have found relying on the CLI from the model providers to be significantly more reliable.

I do like the integrations with the IDE however, they are convenient for rapidly reviewing changes. I just need their terminals to actually work!

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