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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

#531

Post by 2ndorderthought »

ConSeannery wrote: post #525
2ndorderthought wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Which one is #1? Alibaba, deepseek, or moonshot?

I think the Chinese government works differently than the US government. I think China has been subsidizing their electricity grid for decades and leading the world on sustainable electricity namely solar. While the us has let their infrastructure rot and laughed at government inefficiencies for about half that time. The US has data centers running on gas right now while waging wars blowing up gas infrastructure world wide. It would be comical if it wasn't an environmental disaster. Most of them have no hopes at even getting enough power in well established areas short term.

I realize what I am saying may come off as propaganda because the US holds net negative views on China so here are some links.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/10/1119941/china-en...

https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-ga...

I think because openai spent so much money upfront showing how it was possible to do this and laid out a product roadmap China got to get on board much cheaper and easier. I see no reason to not believe any of these companies when they say they didn't squander tons of money to do what they did because I don't know how openai has even spent all the money they have it's actually ridiculous to think about.

https://the-decoder.com/openai-adds-111-billion-to-its-cash-...

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#532

Post by oezi »

boesboes wrote: post #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

If the real cost where really 1900 / 50% = 3800 USD per month then you could rent your own H200 with 140 GB VRAM.

The issue currently is capacity. Servicing the models cost just peanuts of electricity but the popularity is killing them.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#533

Post by exe34 »

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...

kilocode allows you to keep your credits at the end of the month, and if you run out, give you an extra 50% I think.

(No affiliation, they're my next stop when my trial of copilot runs out).

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#534

Post by eolgun »

The 27x multiplier on Opus is the tell. That is not a pricing model designed for broad adoption, it's a price signal that says 'use the cheaper model.' The problem is that once users start self-censoring which model they reach for based on cost anxiety, you've degraded the product experience in a way that's invisible in the metrics but very visible in churn.

Flat subscriptions had one big advantage: zero cognitive overhead per request. That's worth more than people admit.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#535

Post by dannyw »

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.

A very reasonable and fair markup that is clear and well articulated and not changing (at least so far) on a whim.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#536

Post by sandos »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #81

The cheapest copilot plan felt totally unsustainable to me. For around £8 month i was getting 100 opus 4.6 prompts (albeit with a reduced context window size around 128k iirc vs 200k to 1m for first party hosted opus). Gpt5.4 was hosted with 400k context iirc. On top of that, you’ve got 2000minutes of container runtime, so running cloud agents was included. As was anthropic agent sdk mode via copilot which is very co…

I AM mad, because I just signed up for my private copilot sub. Otoh I do have it at work. I suspect we will start noticing differences there, too, but it all depends on the top users, vs average user since it is now pooled, IF they dont just allow extra usage. Bu that has become more expensive now, so not sure what they will do. I am hopeful that very few actually even use it. In my and surrounding teams, only maybe 1 out of 3 people really use it much.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#537

Post by albert_e »

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...

is $10 Pro monthly subscription a pre-requisite before i can purchase $10 in API credits?

PS: i would have loved if I can directly buy $10 in credits and be free to spend it as quickly or as leisurly as I want -- without any monthly expiry or fixed recurring payments

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#538

Post by dannyw »

codebje wrote: post #428
mdesq wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to wonder if it's because of how many Enterprise customers they have who have standardized on Github Copilot and gotten it through the gauntlet of legal approvals etc.

That is exactly where I am. We're putting other providers through the gauntlet. An M4 Studio or two running the latest Qwen3 or whatever counts for state of the art in open models is also looking a little more viable all the time.

They can be super complementary! Open weight models can be your everyday standard goto, and frontier models for the harder and bigger tasks.

Having some open weight deployment or vendor is also a good thing, because you may have domain specific tasks where you can get better results on domain specific problems with a quick finetune.

Unsloth makes it particularly easy. Open weight LLMs are incredibly powerful building blocks.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#539

Post by intrinsicallee »

satvikpendem wrote: post #278
c-hendricks wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to see comments like this in a new light after using some primarily AI-coded apps the past few weeks. They are a lot like apps that were built by hundreds of developers/product people over years and years, in the worst ways. Inconsistent design patterns from page to page, half baked features, inconsistent documentation (but BOY is there ever a lot of it!), NIH ui component libraries that don't act like y…

True but they wouldn't have existed otherwise. If they're end user apps, users generally don't care about the code because they never see it.

Build more broken stuff seems to be the endgame of "move fast and break things".

Like PCC building empty cities, numbers go up I guess.

What a world. I want something else entirely but lots of people seem to be fine with this model.

Re: GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

#540

Post by self_awareness »

Culonavirus wrote: post #390
bewuethr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

I'm using Sonnet 4.6 all the time and it fits 100% cases for me. People overestimate Opus, as well as GPT 5.5.

5.3-Codex is really good enough, Sonnet 4.6 is good enough.

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