Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

github.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 583 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#381

Post by glicvdfhsdf »

giwook wrote: post #71
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.

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…

[dead]

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#383

Post by hgoel »

rvnx wrote: post #60
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.

One theory of the play of SpaceX might do if everyone migrates to query-based billing: Provide cheap and unlimited access to Grok for programmers (hence the Cursor partnership/purchase for distribution). -> This would drag massive revenue right before the IPO announcement, like if the company is super growing -> At a loss, but don't worry, we need these funds to build the biggest datacenter of the universe. This anno…

I think they're going to have to do a lot to overcome the Musk and Grok poison. Even ChatGPT hasn't had as many lapses as Grok has had.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#385

Post by saulpw »

madamelic wrote: post #379
nonameiguess wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite 60, but it's always interesting to me that I feel quite the opposite of this. When I was 16, I didn't have a computer, didn't have a phone, had never used the Internet, but when I think of how life has changed, it's frankly not much. I woke up this morning, scooped my cats' litter boxes, took out some trash, made myself breakfast, ate that, read some news while eating, then lifted weights in my garage,…

Thank you for this insight! I always wonder the views of older people. My parents are very technology forward and have been my entire life so it is difficult to gauge how different life is compared to when they were growing up. It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!" and see as distinct from having 'unlimited' resources and the internet. Your insi…

> It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!"

Since I was there (young, but there), I want to point out that this crosses three eras which all felt quite different:

    1978: typed programs in from a magazine or loaded from a cassette (16kB, TRS-80)
    1983: loaded programs from a floppy (64kB, Apple ][ and C64 etc)
    1988: loaded programs from a hard disk (640kB, IBM PC and Mac).
Exact years vary but these eras were only about 5 years each. Nobody had a floppy in 1978 but almost computer user did by 1983; nobody had a hard drive in 1983 but almost everyone did by 1988.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#386

Post by frabcus »

robertkarl wrote: post #363
brushfoot wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Qwen 3.6 is out now and a touch better than 3.5.

I'm finding Google's Gemma 4 even better though - seems to hold up the agentic loop better than Qwen.

All will load into 20Gb of VRAM. None are amazing, but they do just about work.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#387

Post by nonfamous »

fomoz wrote: post #247
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…

Bingo. I created a few autonomous skills that did exactly that for plan review, implementation, and branch review, review autonomously until green. I was using 100M+ tokens per day, $250 per day or so and only paying $160 per month to GitHub. I cancelled my GHCP sub and switched to Codex last week, so far so good but I miss Gemini 3.1 Pro for UI work.

And this, right here, is why none of us can have nice, cheap things.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#388

Post by joegibbs »

Ilaurens wrote: post #5

"Your plan pricing is unchanged: Copilot Pro remains $10/month and Pro+ remains $39/month, and each includes $10 and $39 in monthly AI Credits, respectively." If there's no discount on credits (in terms of tokens per dollar) over other providers, I'm going to switch to a PAYG provider. If there's a month where there's little to no coding I can pocket the 10$. What incentive do they give to stay with this plan?

$39 of credits at API costs is useless too, what are you going to do there, a single hour of coding? One half of a feature per month?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#390

Post by Culonavirus »

bewuethr wrote: post #99
deweller wrote: post #75

Has anyone found the answer to this yet? > What is the benefit of using the Copilot Pro+ at 39$/month instead of using the Copilot Pro at 10$/month and paying for extra usage?

Some models, for example Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, are only available on Pro+; Pro+ has audit logs and GitHub Spark; that's about it, as far as I can tell from https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/copilot/g...

Yes there's no Opus at all on Pro. GPT 5.5 is also missing. Then again what would you expect, the economic reality is beginning to hit. Also I can't be too mad when the "base" models (GPT 5.4...) are still available and decent.

When I see how fast Codex max thinking GPT 5.5 eats our enterprise seat credits almost anything else seems cheap (until we switch our live systems from 5.4 api to 5.5 api I guess)... good thing I'm not the one paying for those credits and tokens (which is probably how most of the money is going to be made on AI going forward, borderline free chatbots for normies are done)

Post reply on HN