alt Hacker NewsGitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
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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.
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.
In light of this, does anyone have a DGX Spark and use it as a coding agent?
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?
"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...
Amp Free provides $10 free credits every day. Unfortunately, new applications have now been closed.
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?
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.
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.
Well, the free launch for somebody else's money is over.
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’.
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
And so it begins...
haven't touched copilot for one year, this reminds me to cancel, it will take sometime to catch up
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?
aaaand another github outage today. FFS
"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.
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tldr: people were running multi-hour agentic coding sessions for the same flat fee as a one-liner autocomplete, github was eating the bill, and that party's over on june 1st
Still no chips coming from Microslop
Google won
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.