alt Hacker NewsThis is funny, but Copilot is still an interesting case-study and (probably) failed predictor of where we are headed.
We all know, and have known for a long time, that the AI labs selling dollars for a nickel are going to pull that rug, and up that price, at some point.
Copilot, though, has been consistently the weakest mainstream AI coding offering. Inferior to Cursor or Windsurf at editor completions, inferior to Codex, Claude, OpenCode, blah blah blah, at agentic coding and also the old-school chat-style...
And now, it's no longer cheap AND now sucks even more than it has all along — the new $39/month plan is not only worse than all its competitors, but worse than its own $10 plan was a month ago — by a lot.
The thing is, you can't jack the price up unless you're good enough — at least on some axis, to some customer segment — to jack the price. And when you're not good enough, and you have vastly superior competitors who are not doing that yet... you're just forfeiting the game.
Which I agree, Copilot should do — it's the Windows Phone of AI coding assistants, after all — it still seems weird to me to just commit humiliating suicide rather that trying to make some deal with one of those superior competitors.
Instead of just jumping into a dumpster and lighting yourself on fire.
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If their pricing turns out to be what they claim, and copilot cli has accurate token counts, they had the best deal around.
Just today, when I wasn't being especially chatty with GHCP, I used about 12 requests to get a few thousand line changes in 3 projects I'm juggling. The last project repo of copilot I closed, in 3 hours burned 38M input tokens, 28M cache, and like 400K out. For GPT5.4, high. That's like $135, in half the day, 1 of 3 instances. No crazy tool use, just lots of docs and unorganized code. GHCP charged like 70 cents for that on the old plan.
> it's the Windows Phone of AI coding assistants, after all
It seems everything Microsoft does is like this nowadays. They just can't seem to win anymore.
Microslop has lost their way from their ole acquisition investments and have instead hedged a bet on vibing their way into other industries.
It's at least considerate of them to jump into the dumpster first, less of a mess to deal with.
I suspect Microsoft will reneg if enough people cancel.
Even before yesterday, I assumed they made money via the gym model. I'd have months where I'm too busy to use my co pilot subscription in any meaningful way.
Canceling and restarting is too much of a hassle.
But with the pricing update I'd probably use up the 10$ plan within 3 days.
I don't know if anything else is integrated so we'll into GitHub though. I might keep the 10$ plan just for the occasional GitHub AI PR.