alt Hacker NewsGitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
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The era of subsidised inference is truly ending. The new model multipliers (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...) seem like a huge leap, though. From 1x to 6x for new-ish GPT and Sonnet models. 27x for Opus...
Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.
"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?
Well.
Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot.
"To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare."
Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.
Everybody who says it's a 5-9-27x seems to not be aware of the obvious loophole. More like 50x increase. You were able to use over $500 worth of Opus on a $10/mo Github plan easily, no hacks. You could just prompt "plan this out for me, don't stop until fully planned, don't ask any questions", and you would get ~$5 worth of planning in one 3x request. At 100 requests/mo, each easily reaching $5, that's easy $500 worth of tokens.
"Plan prices aren’t changing.”
Isn't this like saying "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo is now a Honda. But the price hasn't changed!"
I 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?
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 with texting, you got what you paid for.
I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise.
Windsurf made a similar change in March: https://docs.windsurf.com/windsurf/accounts/quota
> In March 2026, Windsurf replaced the credit-based system with a quota-based usage system. Instead of buying and spending credits, your plan now includes a daily and weekly usage allowance that refreshes automatically.
With hindsight, per-request pricing makes no sense at all if an agent can burn a widely varying amount of tokens satisfying that request. These pricing plans were designed before coding agents changed the dynamics of token usage.
I wonder if GitHub (Microsoft) is implicitly betting that enterprise demand is sticky enough to absorb these rates, especially given that Opus 4.6 “fast” was being listed at a 27x multiplier. Maybe they saw enough usage at that price point to conclude the demand is real. Or maybe the strategy is to keep the enterprise customers who can justify it while shedding heavier individual and power-user usage.
The interesting question is how long it takes enterprises to notice the capability/pricing tradeoff, and whether they respond by limiting access to the strongest models internally.
The part that worries me is that this market is still very early. Most developers and organizations are still learning how to use these tools effectively. Raising the experimentation cost this much may slow down the discovery process that makes the tools valuable in the first place.
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.
Github had, by far, the most easily game-able agent usage policy. People would force the agent to run a script before the end of turns that consisted entirely of `input("prompt: ")` so that you could essentially talk endlessly to an agent for the price of a turn. I see this less about the future of this industry and more about fighting the costs incurred by bad actors.
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
There is noticeable trend across all agentic coding platforms that this situation is no longer sustainable.
With this kind of pricing (sonnet 4.6 has 9x multiplier, previously 1x) it begs the question why use Copilot to begin with.
You could easily just buy the tokens directly and have a lot more choice as well.
I liked copilot because I didn't have to think about tokens. I get hung up when having to think about the price of things, and its hard to think about the project at the same time I got to think about token usage like a gas bill. The usage system had its own issues, but having a set amount of requests was a very comfortable way to use a paid AI service.
So given that I primarily interact with LLM's through VSCode, and I prefer the Copilot interface to the Claude Code plugin, does anyone have any suggestions on other plugins I should try? In my experience, Copilot is much more "plugged in" than any of the other plugins, in the sense that it can see things like linter outputs in VSCode. Basically, copilot "sees what I see" in a way that no other plugin or command line tool can, which make it much more ergonomic to use.
With this pricing change, I see no reason at all to stick with Copilot in principle, but I really need to solve this issue of IDE integration to move on.
Cancelling. Going with Codex $100, Kimi annual plan, DeepSeek API, and a local LLM once I get a Mac Studio.
Inference economics are going to be brutal in 2026 H2 when DeepSeek's new infra and model improvements come online, and Kimi launches K3. By brutal, I mean for OpenAI and Anthropic.
Are you telling me that inference costs did not go down, as the AI crowd keeps preaching?
Has anyone found the answer to this yet?
> What is the benefit of using the Copilot Pro+ at 39$/month instead of using the Copilot Pro at 10$/month and paying for extra usage?
What's the current situation for coding with Local LLM's on decent hardware? I have an M3 Max with 64 gb of ram and am thinking I should start looking at Ollama and Opencode? Is this a useful stack for smaller personal projects?
After seeing the ridicolous multiplier increase I've added a calendar event to cancel my subscription mid-May.
(I'm a copilot subscriber since 2022)
Current multipliers vs from June
Opus 4.6 3x -> 27x
Opus 4.7 3x -> 27x
GPT 5.4 1x -> 6x
I was surprised to find that this sentence
> Plan prices aren’t changing
did not continue with an em-dash followed by something profound that is changing.
Plan prices aren't changing -- the value you get out of it is.
They're not the only ones in the AI sphere to wind back, but they're the weirdest case in my eyes. Microsoft invests in having engineers building open models and they don't use a single one. I really don't get it.
But what really surprised me most about Copilot is that it would bill you per question, nothing about tokens. So if I managed to produce a prompt that gave me back an insane amount of tokens for something, which using any Claude model would easily accomplish, you were giving me my money's worth, at your own expense. The math is not gonna math out forever.
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 comparable with claude code - not identical, the anthropic “modular prompt” is much leaner in the sdk version.
I cant say im mad, i got above what i paid in value. That said, going forward ill probably go back to openrouter payg rather than a subscription.
I got a free 3months of the gemini £19 plan and ive been playing quite a bit, 3.1 pro is a good model, i just find it slow. Flash i think i under appreciated until now.
I pay for Copilot annually, and mostly for its code auto completion features. I use CC if I want to do anything agentic. Not sure if I want to pay more for occasionally-good-intellisense at this point.
How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?
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.
It begins.
"It" being the end of subsidization of tokens and plans (expected) but while lock-in to foundational models and cloud services is still lacking. Guess investors want their ROI sooner than later, given how big of a wrench the AI boom has thrown into global economics.
So it may still be cheaper for us to train junior engineers in the long run.
“Base plan pricing isn’t changing” is technically true, but for anyone using the more capable models heavily, this is still a price increase in all the ways that matter. The old abstraction was hiding compute costs; the new one mostly stops pretending.
It's almost impossible to afford the usage-based pricing as a heavy user with multiple max and pro subscriptions. Seems like a bet that same-capability inference will keep getting cheaper on something like a Moore's law curve.
I bought a copilot subscription for some small personal projects at Christmas.
I haven't been able to use my subscription much over the busy spring months, but i'm being charged every month.
I'd be tempted to keep the subscription if usage-based billing meant that i'd save money when i had less time.
But today, after hearing this, i cancelled my subscription.
Anyone paying enterprise billing can you shed some light how on the earth you will be able to fund this bill going forward?
Were you able to see assisted AI coding savings proportional to costs increase now you are going to get?
Companies removed people as AI assisted coding will be cheaper and now coding cost are going up from fixed $X to non-deterministic. The posts by Uber few days back about spending 12 months' worth of money in 4 months tells a lot.
Only path forward seems using Open-source models and many companies don't use Chinese that makes only Mistral one as the option.
So I guess from now on GH Copilot is only worth it if you want a quality autocomplete in VSCode.
Does this mean that "Let Opus 4.6 churn in a terminal window my whole workday for a fixed price my employer barely notices" was never sustainable?
Sample of 1 opinion: Massive downgrade for fun vibecoding on the go. Got done much before the recent rate limits on mobile on fun projects, their product went from fun to bad within a few weeks. And now into oblivion I suppose.
Does this mean you can only prompt "Hello" every morning for a month with Opus 4.7 ?
GitHub Copilot has been the most expensive LLM subscription on the internet, when it comes to dollars-per-request-limit. Literally any other subscription provides more usage per dollar. https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/calculate-ai-cost/src/branch/...
some of Github's open source maintainers have lost their free github copilot pro, guess this is really the next step for them to save cost in their infrastructure.
I started to use github copilot with vscode, but have never been too happy about the system. Over the months I gravitated to much more agentic workstyle, hardly ever editing much code by hand. The vscode IDE was getting more in the way. I had already started to look at OpenCode, and when I found it has a web interface, I was happy to switch over. I use a simple editor (KDE's Kate), or just less to skim through the code and/or a git diff. OpenCode has some free models in it, but I think I will need to get some kind of subscription for a better one. But it won't be copilot any more. The market is moving so fast that I don't know what are the most resonable models, or the most flexible way to set them up so I can switch when prices change yet again.
Annual Pro+ subscriber here, mostly using it as a fallback when my Claude Max plan hits limits. The request-based pricing was genuinely the appeal, I could spill over from Max into Copilot without thinking about token costs. Going from 3x to 27x on Opus on annual plans is rough. The newer reasoning models with variable thinking budgets probably made per-request pricing untenable in the long run, but the way this lands on existing annual subscribers feels harsh. Going to look into the prorated refund.
I pay for github copilot solely for completions and use codex for actual agent work. I really wish I could pay like $5/month for just completions or there was a good local alternative for them.
What's the residual value of Copilot after the changes? For Enterprise plans, even copilot code reviews will be charged at token price + github action minutes for the execution of the review. One can roll one's own reviewer and have it spend the API tokens as well. At least one will be able to select the subset of files for the change set, if needed.
The background agents will also depreciate in value because of their harness that's a black box that's not optimized for token usage at all. Rolling one's own will be a better choice here.
Whose idea was this “premium request” model anyway? If you’re going to invent a new metric used to bill, why not align it with what, even at the time, was a clear underlying cost structure that GitHub actively chose to ignore for a more confusing system.
> Code completions and Next Edit suggestions remain included in all plans and do not consume AI Credits.
This is the VSCode autocomplete stuff right? Really enjoy this.
> Copilot code review will also consume GitHub Actions minutes, in addition to GitHub AI Credits. These minutes are billed at the same per-minute rates as other GitHub Actions workflows.
That sucks.
Looks like Microsoft has run out of compute and can't scale it fast enough to serve copilot users and Azure AI Foundry needs, given that the customer base is growing there as well.
In light of this, does anyone have a DGX Spark and use it as a coding agent?
I'm happy I invested in local solutions and cutting context to the bone for API providers. Claims about AI being able to fully replace programmers never took into account the long-run equilibrium price of inference.
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...