alt Hacker NewsGitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Comments
The OnlyFans model for SaaS.
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.
I only use copilot for the occasional auto-complete suggestion. I'm betting I could run a lightweight local LLM with llama.cpp to get similar functionality. Maybe this would be a decent replacement https://github.com/TabbyML/tabby
I was always curious how they can sustain a request based pricing model when requests can range from tiny to huge with all the modalities GH Copilot offers. Was a steal for agentic coding that turned out to be too good to be true, in the end. Still: Thank you for the ride.
I guess this is the "Google App engine" of Vibe coding when google raised pricing of App Engine significantly after being in preview. Doing weird price changes like this when coming out for new services make much more sense than doing this change which will just anger users.
According to `bunx ccusage` I'm easily doing $250-400/day in "real" API costs on my $200/month plan. There's no way everybody else isn't going to do the same thing and completely change the industry again. Both beginner and advanced developers are already hooked on all this stuff and they all know it.
Built credit pricing into my SaaS for AI features and the hardest part wasn't the math, it was that customers can't easily predict their own usage. They underuse and feel cheated, or overuse and churn. Subscriptions hide that volatility from the customer. Usage based pricing makes it their problem, which is honest but harder to sell.
Here goes my Copilot Pro subscription then, reluctantly heading over to Codex CLI since the CC base plan is downright unusable.
I'd be fine with it if they can make Sonnet 4.5 unlimited. I haven't personally seen any major differences between 4.6 or any of the other newer models. Claude 4.5 seems to be the right balance and works great for me.
Just got an email with this announcement.
I have Copilot Pro that I use occasionally, but not enough to tell how the switch to per use would affect my usage.
Based on description Pro plan users will get $10 in monthly AI Credits, but that seems rather low compared to what you could use same plan until now.
The problem is that people expect to get the output of 100 people with a $20 subscription by spawning multiple agents. This is unrealistic. I'm using 2 codex plus account and able to manage a repo with 265-300k lines of code.
As a Github Copilot user, who mostly just uses chat in the VS Code editor but still burns through my Pro limit every month -- what's the best alternative price to performance? Claude Code?
Time to cancel. Happy to hear about some alternatives.
"Paid for annual? Tough luck, from now on your usage limits are reduced by 89%. You can do 11% of what you paid for. Good luck if you paid annual a month ago!"
And then they have the gall to say
> "The bottom line: Plan prices aren’t changing"
If anyone lives in a place like Germany or Australia and has an annual sub, please take them to court, you're guaranteed to win because you have reasonable consumer protections and their ToS doesn't stand a chance. 9x reduction is unreasonable and the consumer cannot be expected to see this coming.
In case some diehard enshittifier believes that consumers should know better and businesses should be allowed to get away with it, where is the line? 99% reduction? Is that still okay?
If this situation is to be acceptable then it should be regulated as a financial product like stocks, which come with knowledge tests of "do you know you can lose all of your money?". And come with regulatory compliance and all that.
This reminds me, I have to cancel co-pilot...
so what's everybody using to get autocompletions in vscode? i've been using copilot just because $10 is cheap, but i use opencode for everything other than completions.
i tried the continue vscode extension, and it seemed kind of janky. are there better options?
In a way, this is good news. I am expecting to see a lot less of AI-boosters claiming that they are "productive in ways you don't understand", now that they'll have to dish out upwards of a few thousand bucks per month for whatever PoCs they are building. And the excited hired middle managers and CEOs spending other people's money will have to be much more careful about their budget starting June.
from these comments I'm going to make mouse.dev pricing as follows
-BYOK runs are $0 to Mouse, period.
-Hosted runs are billed at provider cost + a published markup.
-We will never invent a unit of billing that isn't denominated in tokens, seconds, or tool calls.
-Credits in the paid category never expire.
Why would anyone stay on the Pro+ plan going forward? Pro with openrouter for Opus would be cheaper?
It was just a matter of time, considering how many Mtok you could consume in just 300 prompts.
just cancelled mine. Only reason to have it was I could get a lot more done with a single prompt. No reason why I shouldn't go to the model provider directly instead.
So what's the best alternative now? Openrouter + cline or something else?
End of an era for predictable costs as a small business. We will refer to these times as ‘the good old days’.
Well, the free launch for somebody else's money is over.
what's the best place to transition to on a company level after this change ? should companies just switch to pay as you go with open router ?
This subsidized inference is just a marketing ploy to increase prices and profit.
If common people can have a DIY setup with an open source model cheaper than those behemoths with a scale advantage, it's clear that we have been played.
Time to either self host a Chinese open source model or to just pay the cheap Chinese providers.
I really don't understand why OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft are in competition to see which one of the three will elevate deepseek the most.
cursor, windsurf, and CC are all already on usage-based models so I guess what really matters is whether Copilot's GitHub integration depth justifies the price per token vs the alternatives
Amp Free provides $10 free credits every day. Unfortunately, new applications have now been closed.
And so it begins...
haven't touched copilot for one year, this reminds me to cancel, it will take sometime to catch up
Now do the same thing with the office 365 subscriptions.
That is, redact copilot from the bill for customers that dont use it.
So about a month left before cancelling. Got it.
I'm not sure I understand this. All I know is now, I pay $39/month (actually less because I paid a year up front), use the agent, mostly on auto--and only choosing a model if it got stuck or in a loop--every day, and haven't hit any limits yet. It seemed to good to be true, after hearing others talk of $300/month bills. I guess it was.
$10/month was a too good of a deal.
The plan is to normalize spending hundreds/thousands on tokens per month for the productivity you gain.
See Jensen Huang’s comment that every $500k developer should spend at least $250k worth of tokens per year.
Glad this was announced because I didn't even realize that our (small) team has been paying $20/month for Github Copilot when none of us are using it, so used the opportunity to cancel CoPilot altogether. I think it was free when I first activated it (this was also before Claude, Codex, Gemini, and while not that great, it was why not), and didn't realize it had switched to paid and bundled with our Github bill, and now per usage.
Which one is it:
1. Current models in fact do not solve coding.
2. You can simply wait for a ~year for open-source to catch up and run it locally.
... Once again the Business accounts get all sorts of goodwill [0] and users get the shaft.
[0] - Last weeks changes limited my personal Copilot Pro account but not my Work one
People need to wake up and stop being surprised by these billing increases. I see it on every update of every model. This was all subsidized by VC and company money. Now they need a return and the prices will keep going up. Be glad that you took advantage of that up until now, but can we stop the pearl clutching when we all know the amount of money being dumped into AI and the lackluster returns?
"The bottom line" is the new "Its not just X, its Y"
Github Copilot has for the last week been an absolute shitshow. Clearly something has happened behind the scenes.
AI itself clearly weaker / dumber. Prices increased manyfold.
aaaand another github outage today. FFS
[dead]
[dead]
> 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.