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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

#521

Post by 2ndorderthought »

johndough wrote: post #489
nl wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging by the multiple providers selling it for around the same price (including non-VC funded competitors): no, it isn't subsidized.

Is there somewhere I can look up whether a certain provider is VC-funded?

It's not really about that. China is eating the US's lunch when it comes to ai. Don't get me wrong opus is the strongest model out there today, but that's the us's only advantage right now. Deepseek,qwen,kimi, etc all have fundamental research making the models smaller, more efficient, scalable, etc. in the US the plan is to buy all the hardware, write legislature, embargo other countries, keep models and research closed, so people cannot innovate for the next two to five years.

Unlike the us chinas focus is on research and sustainable building. China also has really good infrastructure for energy, etc. it is also to their advantage to drop 5 billion instead of 2 trillion and beat the us while turning a profit.

Chinas focus in ai is less flashy and because they are the biggest manufacturing super power in the world right now, it directly feeds their economy. They aren't looking for applications or to replace thought workers with slop bots, they have natural needs for this technology. Us manufacturers can't compete so they have to keep companies from selling their goods there see byd. China sees it as commoditizing their complement, the us is risking its entire economy and it's environment and resources, kind of scary.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#522

Post by 2ndorderthought »

rwyinuse wrote: post #279
bluescrn wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap? If/when it gets to the point where it can replace a skilled worker, the service can be sold for close to the same price as that skilled labour. But the AI can run 24/7, reliably, and scale up/down at a moments notice. There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-mo…

"There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best." Based on what exactly? So far every time OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever has released a new top performing model, competitors have caught up quickly. Open source models have greatly improved as well. I expect AI t…

Right now China is flexing the future in my opinion. Smaller, widely available, frontier models for pennies on the dollar.

I think the future of ai will be breakthroughs that let it run on commodity hardware, and the average person will not be paying for it from the cloud unless they want to be surveilled or are stuck on older hardware.

Right now I am running about what was a frontier model 1-2 years ago on a junk machine. Some people are running what was a frontier model 4 months ago on PCs and laptops that cost 5,000. In a year I think the landscape will be even better.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#523

Post by ThunderSizzle »

2001zhaozhao wrote: post #450
throwaway85825 wrote: post #432

This marks the beginning of the end of the AI free money era. Next they will dramatically raise prices when they have to be profitable on tokens.

I am seriously considering binge buying local AI inference hardware. The way this is going, there will be another big GPU crunch soon because everyone will need local models and/or open model inference capacity to do their programming tasks when the subsidized subscriptions are no longer flowing.

I just bought a 3090 off of Amazon. It was expensive ($1500ish), but covered under prime and an included any reason 90 return policy.

But that gives me a good while to determine if it's worth it or not. I've heard good and bad, so here's hoping for good or close to it.

I wasn't going to fork out $1000 on a chance it might be enough with a rough return strategy.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#524

Post by 2ndorderthought »

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.

It's foolish not to care about privacy especially as a company. You know how it prevents you from emailing yourself your tax documents? Meanwhile thousands of employees are sending literal design docs, software, product goals, etc to several ai third partys. Not only is that insane, the companies they are sending it too intend too and openly admit to scanning the data, make software products themselves, and intend to create models that can produce their products automatically.

The reason local models hasn't caught on is several fold. It's marketing to say your company follows the latest trend, and there's an inherent pressure to keep AI companies afloat so the economy doesn't entirely collapse. The other is, it wasn't until the last month that these models have caught up to frontier models. They just did, and they are more efficient and don't require a team of 500 to deploy.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#525

Post by ConSeannery »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #515
Gigachad wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is deepseek still on subsidized pricing though.

Near zero probability of that. The model is more efficient and the company who trained it did not blunder trillions of dollars to do so. China has better electricity infrastructure than the US too, so the likelihood they can scale out before the US ever could is high. Long term deepseek, Alibaba, etc hold the most cards for sustainable AI even despite the attempted Nvidia embargo I am not shilling China, this is just…

Lol what? You seriously think that the #1 Chinese AI company is not being subsidized by the Chinese government?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#526

Post by XCSme »

quietsegfault wrote: post #406
everfrustrated wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking the same. Downgrade to Pro and use OpenRouter (same price) for overage. Seems a massive loss for Microsoft. Presumably there's a further rugpull to come.

OpenRouter charges a 5% (?) fee for buying credits.

Yeah, but you get the benefit of using any model of your choice.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#527

Post by XCSme »

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 am a bit confused by the separation between VSCode and Copilot. If I cancel my Pro+ subscription, can I still use Copilot with my own OpenRouter key?

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#528

Post by 2ndorderthought »

minimaxir wrote: post #65
rvnx wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It takes longer to build a datacenter with that much capacity than it does for the market to respond.

Buying real estate in imaginary places is lucrative at first

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#529

Post by try-working »

aitchnyu wrote: post #477
try-working wrote: post #394

Cancelling. Going with Codex $100, Kimi annual plan, DeepSeek API, and a local LLM once I get a Mac Studio. Inference economics are going to be brutal in 2026 H2 when DeepSeek's new infra and model improvements come online, and Kimi launches K3. By brutal, I mean for OpenAI and Anthropic.

What about Minimax? Their api pricing is half of Kimi and Z.ai.

Their models are too small for coding. Maybe with M3, we'll see.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#530

Post by oezi »

bubbab wrote: post #446
johndough wrote: post #364

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.

So enormously that the haven't had any sane permission system built in this year.
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