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GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

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491–500 of 583 posts

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#491
After 2 months of using copilot pro, they've charged us 22$ in premium requests for my user, i spend roughly 1900$ in tokens, going of the on-demand pricing. This is estimated to be around 40-60% of real costs. They are undercharging by a factor 50 to 90!

This is just the start of the rug-pull

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#493
post #74

I don't use Copilot or any paid AI but all of this usage-based billing reminds me of cellphones back when you paid per individual text message. Usage paying for AI is 1000x crazier because you're not even getting a guarantee in the thing you pay for in the end. You have to keep feeding it prompts and hope it gives you the solution you want. You may end up with no expected result yet you are paying for it. At least wi…

> I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise. That's already the case if you can self-host an LLM; you don't even need a mythical H200: gamer-grade GeForce cards can get you a long way there (if this page is to be believed: https://www.runpod.io/gpu-compare/rtx-5090-vs-h200 ) ...after RAM prices return to normalcy, of course - and t…

That page compares models that easily fit inside the ram on either GPU. The biggest difference comes when one card can fit a model and the other cannot.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#494
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a strong signal the money burning party is coming to a close. Nearly all AI companies have tightened their belts in the past month. Anthropic removed Claude Code from the Pro plan, Z.AI increased their prices, GitHub removed some Claude models from Copilot, now this. Also, Opus 4.7 seems like a model more intended to save Anthropic money than push the bar.

> Seems like a strong signal the money burning party is coming to a close. One provider who was undercutting the market with non-standard billing model moving to a more standard billing and prices doesn't seem like that strong of a signal, other than that Copilot was underpriced. I don't disagree with your other points though.

It was the only clear model from a user's perspective. Sure, a request may not perform as expected, or end earlier than desired, but it was an agreed to cost that was clear on both sides: 1 enter press in a prompt window = 1 request.

If they wanted to limit what a request can do via their harness, I'm sure they artificially could.

I hate all of the other plans I've seen of here a "credit" or here's a "bucket of usage", and we pull an announced amount from it based on arbitrary info that can't be audited or proven, and most of shat is spent might be entirely useless anyway.

Claude Code has a problem where 1 request could take a significant portion of your 5 hour window, and it's unclear why.

It's much like SEO, where Google sometimes says things that might help, but it's just magic wand eaving hoping something works.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#495
post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Copilot has improved immensely in 2026. I'd say to give it a try again if you're up for it. It works about as well as Claude Code these days in my experience.

Unfortunately, Opus was removed from the student plan in March. So far, I had been happy with GPT-5.3-Codex, but that model seems to have been removed this morning.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This might be Pi being buggy as heck.

When using opencode or copilot CLI, the error messages are displayed normally and it's possible to see what's going on. Under Pi, it sometimes just hangs, or Pi crashes with some bun stacktrace and that's it.

Copilot has introduced additional limits for Claude models in past month, and it's rather easy to hit it. Pi often doesn't show anything when this limit hits (although sometimes it shows the error, I guess it depends on Pi version).

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#497
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been profitable if that premium credit cost more than a negotiated discounted rate with Anthropic. We have no way of knowing if there were negotiated rates though!

There is no way to make that cost model profitable consistently. If 1 prompt can mean 100's/1000's of requests over hours, and you only pay for that 1 premium prompt, that can never be profitable.

They can engineer the harness to limit the amount it does. When pressing enter, it's be nice to have a "budget" per prompt, much like the model multiplier. When the harness used up the budget, it cleans up and cuts off the work.

But that would entail actual work and effort...and care for user's time and money.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#498
post #245
post #74

I don't use Copilot or any paid AI but all of this usage-based billing reminds me of cellphones back when you paid per individual text message. Usage paying for AI is 1000x crazier because you're not even getting a guarantee in the thing you pay for in the end. You have to keep feeding it prompts and hope it gives you the solution you want. You may end up with no expected result yet you are paying for it. At least wi…

I expect in the future we'll find out that someone in the industry was juicing the numbers with fake thinking tokens or something. The whole pricing model of charging you for the tokens it generates while not knowing how much it is going to generate going in has always been pretty crazy.

It reminds of early smart phones when the cell providers pulled away from unlimited data...and then they brought it back in s few years.

I think competition will get fierce. We see many people are attracted to the price stability of GHCP - it became clear what a request could do - the problem is that they didn't match results with cost. It's not clear what a 5 hour usage window in Claude Code can do.

There's no reason the harness couldn't provide a quote on the next request, aside from it takes effort and it would be upfront to the user, creating expectations.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Uber and Airbnb are not autonomous robots.

If people wouldn't use their services, nothing would happen. They would just go bankrupt.

So yeah, I'd say it's entirely people's fault. Because people just wanted to use their services without thinking what they're causing.

Customers who think only about themselves and noone else.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#500

Soon it will be cheaper to just do it yourself

It may already be cheaper if you calculate the hidden cost accumulated by LLM generated tech debt. At least some of it could be avoided by manually doing it better to begin with.

I searched for "Show HN" for the first time ever and I got the impression that most of the costs associated with the projects could have been avoided by never starting them to begin with.

"VibeBrowser", "Financial Database API for Vibe Coders" followed by dozens of self feeding AI projects with barely anyone doing anything that isn't related to AI.

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