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Shrinkflation
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
451–460 of 583 posts
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#452I 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
Liability. I work in a tightly regulated market and I cannot use any service due to be in touch with PII data. If it was my option I would just use OpenCode with deepseek, it is more than enough for the majority of my tasks.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
And handling API tokens, and billing, and reliability, and middleware. I am not affiliated with them but it’s not “just” routing. Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.
> handling API tokens Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial. > billing Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway. > reliability They increase reliability? > middleware Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly. I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing. > Apple still charges 30%. 3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping…
There's nothing trivial about getting a Google API key. Openrouter removes that stress from my life. And I can route requests to providers above a certain TPS threshold. And much more.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#454"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?
That's enough for 4 days of programming if you use GLM5.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#455Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why the multipliers then at all?
The multipliers are there only for current annual plan customers. After 2026 its all tokens.
So they're changing the product that people already paid an annual subscription for to the worse. That's asking for legal complaints.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#456Earlier quoted context omitted.
Try Cline, a vscode plugin that's been around since the start and has really active development. You can also use most providers as well.
Saw this new Cline fork mentioned in another post: https://github.com/dirac-run/dirac Also heard of more and more people moving to Kilo Code or OpenChamber instead.
I tried Openchamber. Far too buggy. Cline seems like the best bet.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#457"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?
They could add rollover balances and be back to cell phone plans in the early 2000s.
Only if we also get unlimited nights & weekends.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
To not depend on an external company that can decide the price.
That's a silly reason. For non-agent use cases what kind of utilization are you going to average on your own GPU, 5-10%? And that's without batching. Even with overhead and scaling for peak use and a large profit margin, any company with an ounce of competition will be vastly cheaper than self-hosting. And for models you can run yourself, there will be plenty of competition.
I think you are calculating with current prices. Try to extrapolate the price in one year, seeing the current trends instead.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does feel like the music is about to stop. It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.
This is the best AI programming will be. From here on the enshitification starts and the prices go up.
As predicted by many. The math is, as usual, mathing.
Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So, silicon valley decides to use their playbook of expand at all costs by burning money to acquire the market (like a carcinoma), and it is the users fault ?
Should we be blamed about uber destroying the taxi business, or airbnb the hotel one? Oh sorry, "disrupting".
Uber was dirt cheap, now it is the same price as taxis, and the people working for it (the "partners", not employees) have no social benefits.
Airbnb was cheap and humane, now it is THE cause for housing crises and massive residential property "investment".
The playbook of silicon valley is destructive, not disruptive.
It is by design aimed towards wealth accumulation. The ones with most money can capture the market, and make even more. It really is late stage capitalism.
And the more wealth inequality there is, the more pain, poverty and instability will be as well. AI will only exacerbate this.