alt Hacker NewsEven without hacks, Copilot is still a cheap way to use Claude models:
- $10/month
- Copilot CLI for Claude Code type CLI, VS Code for GUI
- 300 requests (prompts) on Sonnet 4.5, 100 on Opus 4.6 (3x)
- One prompt only ever consumes one request, regardless of tokens used
- Agents auto plan tasks and create PRs
- "New Agent" in VS Code runs agent locally
- "New Cloud Agent" runs agent in the cloud (https://github.com/copilot/agents)
- Additional requests cost $0.04 each
Replies
I've had single prompt to Opus consume as many as 13 premium messages. The Copilot harness is so gimped so they can abstract tokens from messages. Every person that started with Copilot that I know that tried CC were amazed at the power difference. Stepping out of a golf cart and into <your favorite fast car>.
It seems like it's the cheapest way to access Claude Sonnet 4.5, but the model distribution is clearly throttled compared to Claude Sonnet 4.5 on claude.ai.
That being said, I don't know why anyone would want to pay for LLM access anywhere else.
ChatGPT and claude.ai (free) and GitHub Copilot Pro ($100/yr) seem to be the best combination to me at the moment.
+1. I see all these posts about tokens, and I'm like "who's paying by the token?"