I really dislike these AI middleman plans. The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero compared to directly buying from Anthropic or OpenAI, where 99% of the value is being delivered from. I don't understand why anyone would want to deal with Microsoft as a vendor if they don't have to. The short period of discounted usage was always the obvious rug pull.
I would also add that the models they supply through Azure Foundry are covered under my employer's existing customer agreement, by which MS is not allowed to train models on our data (which might include IP of the company or its clients). For organizations worried about that, it's nice & cozy.
Bingo. Github Copilot is mostly for organizations that have an existing Azure bill and would rather see that go up then get a new vendor bill. Professional middlemen.
I disagree. I like the standard interface, being able to easily switch models as things invariably change from week to week, and having a relationship with one company. That's why I'm a big fan of openrouter and Cursor. Not too much experience with Copilot, but I think there's a huge value add in AI middlemen.
Because if you’re a vscode user up until a couple days ago you could hammer Opus 4.6 all day every day and pay nowhere close to the Claude Max plan. Many people exploited this and the subsidy is closing.
The Anthropic Pro plan cost double and gave you, I don't know, a tenth the usage, depending on how efficiently you used Copilot requests, and no access to a large set of models including GPT and Gemini and free ones.
Yes, I loved my $10 a month person subscription for light coding tasks, it worked great. I'd use claude code max for heavy lifting, but the $10 a month copilot plan kept me off cursor for the IDE centric things.
Opus 4.6 is no longer available and Opus 4.7 chews through monthly limits with reckless abandon. The value-add of GH Copilot is basically gone (at least for individuals on the Pro or Pro+ plans.)
I was accounting for that in the 1% of value. I don't see a ton of value in this for development, you end up just always using the smartest model, with maybe tuning subagents to slightly dumber but much faster model. You really only need one subscription to the provider of the smartest model, with maybe 30 minutes of setup time to switch over if SOTA ever switches back to OpenAI.
Except Copilot doesnt bill you per token like all those companies do, they bill you per prompt, at least Copilot in Visual Studio 2026 which is insane to me, are they just hosting all those models and able to reduce costs of doing so?
I have thought about making a product out of something I'm building and trying to make the cost of my product a percentage on top of whatever I could resell Anthropic or OpenAI (or whatever) tokens for. I get this may be unpopular, maybe I should just stick with BYO-key.
I have a GitHub Pro subscription, renewed for the 2nd year, and I just found out I can no longer use Opus with it. Opus was one of the reasons I had a subscription in the first place.
Opus 4.6 had a 3x multiplier in Pro. Now the new Opus 4.7 model has 7.5x in Pro+, which offers 5x more requests, but costs 4x more than Pro. So now Opus is essentially 2x the price it used to be.
Reading the comments here drives home an industry wide problem with these tools: people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can, and because they’re cargo-culting. This is perhaps the first time that software has had this kind of problem, and coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making.
I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.
Folks are complaining because they lost unlimited access to a Ferrari, when a bicycle is fine for 95% of trips.
AI should decide the level of model needed, and fallback if it fails.
It mostly is a UX problem. Why do I need to specify the level of model beforehand?
Many problems don't allow decision pre-implementation.
That’s certainly an opinion. Not one I agree with, but sure, if you entirely outsource all of your thinking to the magic box, then you probably want the box to have the strongest possible magic.
Model selection for day to day tasks based on vibes is not very scientific. Micromanaging the model doesn't seem like a great idea when doing real professional work with professional goals/deadlines/pressures.
It’s deeply ironic that the folks who want to outsource as much thought to the model as possible are saying that my stance - use your brain to decide the right tool for the job - is tantamount to “vibes”.
Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.
> Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.
Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.
I’m sure you’d find that Haiku is pretty functional if there were a constraint on your use.
> I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong
I’m not saying that. If anything, it really doesn’t matter much what model you use, and it’s only a case of “you’re holding it wrong” in the sense that you have to use your brain to write code, and that if you outsource your thinking to a machine, that’s the fundamental mistake.
In other words, it’s a tool, not a magic wand. So yeah, you do have to understand how to use it, but in a fairly deterministic way, not in a mysterious woo-woo way.
I think it heavily depends on how you're using it. If you understand your codebase and you're using it like "build a function that does x in y file" then smaller/cheaper models are great. But if you're saying "hey build this relatively complex feature following the 30,000 foot view spec in this markdown doc" then Haiku doesn't work (unless your "complex feature" is just an api endpoint and some UI that consumes it).
I largely agree. But that goes back to my point (albeit with mixed metaphors): there are lots of people who are just hitting things with a jackhammer in lieu of understanding how to properly use a hammer.
I basically never just yolo large code changes, and use my taste and experience to guide the tools along. For this, Haiku is perfectly fine in nearly all circumstances.
> I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.
I mean at some point some people learn...
I was doing Opus for nasty stuff or otherwise at most planning and then using Sonnet to execute.
Buuuuut I'm dealing with a lot of nonstandard use cases and/or sloppy codebases.
Also, at work, Haiku isn't an enabled model.
But also, if I or my employer are paying for premium requests, then they should be served appropriately.
As it stands this announcement smells of "We know our pricing was predatory and here is the rug pull."
My other lesser worry isn't that Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multi, it's that the multiplier is quoted as an 'introductory' rate.
Haiku is complete crap compared to sonnet in GHCP. A basic task in Haiku takes 3 prompts with a lot of correction. 1 prompt in sonnet. It isn't worth a third of the price if I have to fix it twice.
This thread is pretty quiet for what strikes me as a substantial set of changes with, presumably, more substantial changes still to come for anyone not grandfathered into a Pro plan.
I get the impression that the intersection of HN posters and Copilot users is quite small in practice; that Claude Code and Codex suck up all the oxygen in this room. But it seems plausible we’ll see similar “true costs greatly exceed our current subscription pricing” from Anthropic and OpenAI someday soon…
Using Copilot Pro with Pi, way better and smarter than using Claude Code. I haven't gotten a single e-mail and just wanted to use Opus (I use Sonnet 95% of the time with Opus for issues where Sonnet is struggling) and got an error message. No prior warning, nothing, I'm pissed. They just rugpulled all paying customers man. I liked Copilot because I can plan my usage over a whole month and I'm not "forced" to use it for a week before hitting limits unlike Claude and Codex.
Do you have a citation on this? I have a Claude Pro subscription and looked at the comparison page and it says this under Pro:
Everything in Free and:
Claude Code directly in your codebase
Power through tasks with Cowork
Higher usage limits
Deep research and analysis
Memory that carries across conversations
Speaking as someone where he only 'real' option we have at work is Copilot Plugin, but I also use Copilot Plugin at home....
This is a shitty shitty shitty move.
As a personal user, I can now only use Opus 4.7 at a 7.5x 'Introductory' multiplier if I upgrade to pro+, but at work I can still apparently do Opus 4.6 at a 3x Multiplier on my work 'enterprise' account.
Honestly it strikes me as though someone at Github Copilot took Palantir's manifesto to heart; Screw the individual, consolidate power to companies on every level.
> If you hit unexpected limits or these changes just don’t work for you, you can cancel your Pro or Pro+ subscription and you will not be charged for April usage. Please reach out to GitHub support between April 20 and May 20 for a refund.
Good thing I had just finished migrating all of my workflows to OpenCode for the time being!
It's a shame because the VsCode copilot experience is quite good out of the box compared to all of the other harnesses I've used. But with typical lack of transparency, and sudden, harsh changes... What are they thinking?
After the restrictive rate limiting they've already instituted, I'm simply cancelling and continuing by using providers directly.
Yesterday, Opus 4.6 cost three credits. You can no longer use 4.6 or 4.5.
Opus 4.7 is available today for 7.5 credits per prompt.
They have also suspended new signups.
After testing all of the major IDEs/tools that integrate with LLMs over the last four weeks, I was happy to settle on Copilot. I, and others, seem to be a lot confident in that decision. Especially since there seems to be no refund path for people who prepaid for a year.
In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.
I'm really curious where all of this lands, and if AI coding tools will be something that only a small percentage can genuinely afford at a competitive level.
> In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.
Warning: baseless speculation/theorizing ahead.
This is the consequence of LLM inference being really expensive to run, and LLM inference companies being really attractive to VCs. The VC silly money means their costs are totally decoupled from revenue for a while, but I guess eventually people look at incomings vs outgoings and start asking questions.
Previous big trends like SaaS apps, NFTs, blockchain etc were similarly attractive to VCs (for a period of time at least for the last two, the first one is still pretty attractive to VCs), but nowhere near as expensive to run so the behaviour of the companies running them wasn't quite the same.
AI is still in the "VCs subsidizing everything" -phase.
So:
- DO use AIs to build tools for yourself faster. If the AI goes away, the dashboard and scripts you made will still work.
- DO NOT build your business on top of 3rd party AI services with no way of swapping the backend easily. The question isn't whether there's going to be a "rug-pull", but when it happens. It might be sudden like this one or gradual where they just pump up the price like boiling a frog.
So this is pretty devastating to my general workflows [1] right now, and poorly timed to boot, with no wind-down at all.
It was clear (see the linked post from 70 days ago) that the current offering was unsustainable, but I'm a bit taken aback at how sharp the clawback is.
Yes, Github's per-request pricing was insane; anyone suggesting using CC instead or asking if any other provider is as cheap just doesn't understand the insanity. Clearly losing a lot of money on the people making good use of it.
I was actually hoping they would change it to something that more closely tracks their actual costs so that they wouldn't have to rug-pull this badly. In particular what was really bad about it was that sending prompts to agents while they were working (to give them corrections) cost extra so I stopped doing that (after initially OpenCode didn't cause billing for that, until they became official).
Note that the 7.5x multiplier is only for the promotional period (until end of April), then it'll get even worse. If I had to guess it'll be priced at 10x.
I guess it makes more sense for me to just get Claude Pro instead. I was using my Copilot license only because of Opus 4.6 access as all other models seemed crippled in comparison in Copilot; does not even make sense to upgrade to Pro+ which goes from $10/mo to $40/mo and only gives you access to a model that has 7x the rate - 5x the limit at 7x the rate for 4x the price does not seem appealing at all.
I wouldn't mind this change that much if opus-4.7 worked properly in copilot cli. It keeps stopping mid-thought or task and forces me to waste more prompts for no observable reason.
Looks like I'm ending my subscription, good (likely too good, no way my account was even remotely within profitable range) access to opus-4.6 was the only reason I used this at all.
Are you using through regular copilot (the 'local' agent type), or through the separate claude agent type (which I believe you have to activate in your repository settings on github).
I had the exact same issues with the latter - randomly stops working, wipes chat history, just generally seems to be totally broken. But the former works totally fine and still lets you select sonnet/opus. My experience was before this recent 4.6 -> 4.7 change though.
Welp. I already added a $20 Claude Pro subscription to complement my $10 Github Copilot Pro subscription and $10 DuckDuckGo Plus. That was partly to show support for Anthropic after the OpenAI/DOD episode, but also because I've been using Opus 4.5 exclusively with Copilot and I figured I should try Claude Code eventually.
Now it's going to cost me an upgrade to $39 Github Pro+ to keep using Opus, and even then it's with much higher multipliers. I don't fully understand the extent to which this reflects actual costs for Opus versus Microsoft leveraging network effects to discourage the usage of a competitor.
I didn't really want to wander outside of VSCode just yet because I was happy with VSCode/Copilot/Opus-4.5 and I don't want to spend all my time experimenting when stuff is changing so fast. But I guess my hand has been forced.
You can also use Claude Code in a VS Code terminal window, which I much prefer for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Granted, I’ve moved to Zed in the past few months. I’m doing the same there.
It's quite cheap at $10 at 1000 premium requests (1 request is like a plan mode + implementation + tests + commit & push). The only problem is I have already used it all, but was billed on the 3rd day of the month, and have to wait till next month to use it.
I cannot describe how disappointing it is to be switching to this insane time limit window based pricing. I absolutely abhor that I'll be subjected to 5 hour chunks of time where I'll be limited at some point in that window of time, and be told I'll have to wait. And then there is a weekly limit.
That's not how my creative energy works. I have time that I want to solve problems, and I want to solve them. I don't want a cooldown timer applied to solving a problem. Not to mention the anxiety of realizing that while I sleep I could have burned tokens in that time.
I'm incredibly disappointed when I sat down to my hobbyist programming time and realized copilot was suddenly and dramatically changed in a way that is incredibly disheartening.
Meter my token usage DON'T tell me when I can use them! ARGH.
> I'm incredibly disappointed when I sat down to my hobbyist programming time and realized copilot was suddenly and dramatically changed in a way that is incredibly disheartening.
Guess it’s time to rediscover the lost art of programming without an LLM.
I cannot understand people still using anthropic models on copilot, when gpt 5.4 is better and 3 to 7 time cheaper. Anthropic quite obviously raised their licensing to the max. You probably can still have a taste of it for a few minutes before being limited on their own subscription.
Simple, for what I'm doing Opus 4.6 (and before that, Opus 4.5) are just much better at following my instructions and achieve consistently better results.
From what I've been gathering, this split in success seems to depend a lot on the types of tasks, the domains / programming languages / frameworks used, and style of prompting.
I couldn't get 5.2 to follow instructions for the life of me, even when repeating multiple times to do / not do something. 5.3-codex was an improvement and 5.4 while _usually_ decent still regularly forgets, goes on unnecessary tangents, or otherwise repeatedly stops just to ask for continuation.
Sure, I'm paying 3x more per request, but I'm also doing 5x fewer requests.
Or well, used to. Still bummed about them dropping 4.6.
My experience is similar. Opus, especially Opus 4.5, understands my intentions better even when poorly phrased, and more consistently follows my instructions to do only what's necessary and no more.
As far as I can tell, the distinctive feature of my workflow is that I'm giving it small, contained single-commit-sized tasks and limited context. For instance: "For all controller `output()` functions under `Controller/Edit/` and `Controller/Report/`, ensure that they check `Auth::userCanManage`." Others seem to be taking bigger swings.
GPT's output is awful and it gets even more awful when you try to work out a solution "together" because it shits out 10 paragraphs with 20 options instead of focusing and getting things done.
Anecdotally, I experimented GPT-5.4 xhigh and something about the code it wrote just didn't vibe with me.
It felt like I constantly have to go back and either fix things or I just didn't like the results. Like the forward momentum/progress on my projects overally wasn't there over time. Even with tho its cheaper it just doesn't feel worth it, to the point I start to feel negative emotions.
I'm actually a bit worried that I've somehow become to feel more negative emotions with agentic coding. Quicker to feel frustrated somehow when things aren't working.
Same for me. I would still be happy with my Copilot Pro subscription if I could use 5.4 with 1x coefficient (and 5.4 mini with 0.33x).
But seeing that they are stopping to get new subscriptions, and rumours/evidence that they plan to increase coefficients of remaining models, it seems they want us to see "the writing on the wall"
This is some shit, coming with 0 notice at the start of a work week. My exposure to Claude is only via Copilot which has worked very well for my purposes. I didn't have to learn a ton for it to just start working. I guess I'll look into other options now as I really want to continue using Opus, but don't have a need to 4x my spend on Copilot quite yet.
I'm not surprised at all. This was one of the most generous plans out there, offering frankly ridiculous pricing based on a single prompt regardless of turns taken or tokens used. I was subscribed for a month around Christmas and got a shitload of tokens out of Opus 4.5 for a measly $10.
Damn it was good while it lasted, but it was obvious the previous per request pricing scheme was misaligned with their actual costs. MS's product people must be seriously detached from their technical and financial people for it to have even lasted this long (or they're willing to burn a lot of money for the typical "make customers happy and then rug pull" cycle, but hey, Hanlons razor).
Given that they've already silently had session + weekly rate limits for the past couple weeks already at least (I've hit them), I wonder if this change is just making them visible to the user, or if it's actually tightening them too.
If it's the former then I can say they're still significantly more generous than claude pro (on the pro+ plan), so this might be okay. If it's the latter, and the new limits are similar to claude pro then copilot is going to be significantly less useful to me.
It's quite telling, they've paused new signups because Microsoft doesn't have enough compute, and they moved Opus to only being accessible on a higher tier because Anthropic doesn't have enough compute either.
They're all operating at a loss, enshittification is coming for us all.
All of the evidence shows that anthropic is dealing with a capacity crisis since February.
There are no good solutions for them.
If OpenAI is indeed overbuilt they will completely eliminate Claude.
I really dislike these AI middleman plans. The value-add that Microsoft brings to Github Copilot is near zero compared to directly buying from Anthropic or OpenAI, where 99% of the value is being delivered from. I don't understand why anyone would want to deal with Microsoft as a vendor if they don't have to. The short period of discounted usage was always the obvious rug pull.
> I don't understand why anyone would want to deal with Microsoft as a vendor if they don't have to.
It can bill to our Azure sub and I don't have to go through the internal bureaucracy of purchasing a new product/service from a new vendor.
I would also add that the models they supply through Azure Foundry are covered under my employer's existing customer agreement, by which MS is not allowed to train models on our data (which might include IP of the company or its clients). For organizations worried about that, it's nice & cozy.
Bingo. Github Copilot is mostly for organizations that have an existing Azure bill and would rather see that go up then get a new vendor bill. Professional middlemen.
This is pretty straightforward compared to the giant universe of companies that resell Microsoft services.
The number of intermediaries that some customers, especially governmental agencies, go through to get just an Azure bill can be wild...
I disagree. I like the standard interface, being able to easily switch models as things invariably change from week to week, and having a relationship with one company. That's why I'm a big fan of openrouter and Cursor. Not too much experience with Copilot, but I think there's a huge value add in AI middlemen.
Because if you’re a vscode user up until a couple days ago you could hammer Opus 4.6 all day every day and pay nowhere close to the Claude Max plan. Many people exploited this and the subsidy is closing.
Just use claude code directly with a pro plan instead of copilot for roughly the same cost.
On wait, nevermind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
The Anthropic Pro plan cost double and gave you, I don't know, a tenth the usage, depending on how efficiently you used Copilot requests, and no access to a large set of models including GPT and Gemini and free ones.
> Just use claude code directly with a pro plan
Usage limits are/were higher in Copilot. They also charge per prompt, not per token.
Yes, I loved my $10 a month person subscription for light coding tasks, it worked great. I'd use claude code max for heavy lifting, but the $10 a month copilot plan kept me off cursor for the IDE centric things.
Me too. Claude isn't the best option when all you do is ask "what's this error message", every 10 minutes or so.
Yeah this was me. I just got a message that I hit my limit and now I am looking into what it takes to run Qwen on local hardware.
Good, I hope Microsoft lost a lot of money in the deal.
From a friend in GitHub: they've been burning so much money because of Opus.
Opus 4.6 is no longer available and Opus 4.7 chews through monthly limits with reckless abandon. The value-add of GH Copilot is basically gone (at least for individuals on the Pro or Pro+ plans.)
I also just saw:
> Claude Code to be removed from Pro Tier? > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
one subscription for access to most of the models..
I was accounting for that in the 1% of value. I don't see a ton of value in this for development, you end up just always using the smartest model, with maybe tuning subagents to slightly dumber but much faster model. You really only need one subscription to the provider of the smartest model, with maybe 30 minutes of setup time to switch over if SOTA ever switches back to OpenAI.
Except Copilot doesnt bill you per token like all those companies do, they bill you per prompt, at least Copilot in Visual Studio 2026 which is insane to me, are they just hosting all those models and able to reduce costs of doing so?
I have thought about making a product out of something I'm building and trying to make the cost of my product a percentage on top of whatever I could resell Anthropic or OpenAI (or whatever) tokens for. I get this may be unpopular, maybe I should just stick with BYO-key.
It makes enterprise deployments much easier because most orgs already have github enterprise.
They will also change the business and enterprise plans to token based: https://www.wheresyoured.at/news-microsoft-to-shift-github-c...
I have a GitHub Pro subscription, renewed for the 2nd year, and I just found out I can no longer use Opus with it. Opus was one of the reasons I had a subscription in the first place.
Opus 4.6 had a 3x multiplier in Pro. Now the new Opus 4.7 model has 7.5x in Pro+, which offers 5x more requests, but costs 4x more than Pro. So now Opus is essentially 2x the price it used to be.
It’s likely that Sonnet 4.7 will be the new 3x model in Pro — https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/changes-to-gi...
This whole thing is a massive asshole move, and probably illegal in all countries with a minimum set of consumer protections.
Reading the comments here drives home an industry wide problem with these tools: people are just using the latest and most expensive models because they can, and because they’re cargo-culting. This is perhaps the first time that software has had this kind of problem, and coders are not exactly demonstrating great discretionary decision making.
I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.
Folks are complaining because they lost unlimited access to a Ferrari, when a bicycle is fine for 95% of trips.
AI should decide the level of model needed, and fallback if it fails. It mostly is a UX problem. Why do I need to specify the level of model beforehand? Many problems don't allow decision pre-implementation.
That’s certainly an opinion. Not one I agree with, but sure, if you entirely outsource all of your thinking to the magic box, then you probably want the box to have the strongest possible magic.
Model selection for day to day tasks based on vibes is not very scientific. Micromanaging the model doesn't seem like a great idea when doing real professional work with professional goals/deadlines/pressures.
It’s deeply ironic that the folks who want to outsource as much thought to the model as possible are saying that my stance - use your brain to decide the right tool for the job - is tantamount to “vibes”.
> Most of the time, Haiku is fine.
Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.
> Haiku is most definitely not fine for the code bases that I work on. Sonnet is probably fine for most daily tasks, but Opus is still needed to find that pesky bug you've been chasing, or to thoroughly review your PR.
Yeah, I hear that a lot, but it never comes with proof. Everyone is special.
I’m sure you’d find that Haiku is pretty functional if there were a constraint on your use.
I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong, especially when you hear the problem a lot.
Maybe, just maybe, the tool isn't suitable for all problem spaces.
> I don't think it's really helpful to tell people they're holding it wrong
I’m not saying that. If anything, it really doesn’t matter much what model you use, and it’s only a case of “you’re holding it wrong” in the sense that you have to use your brain to write code, and that if you outsource your thinking to a machine, that’s the fundamental mistake.
In other words, it’s a tool, not a magic wand. So yeah, you do have to understand how to use it, but in a fairly deterministic way, not in a mysterious woo-woo way.
I think it heavily depends on how you're using it. If you understand your codebase and you're using it like "build a function that does x in y file" then smaller/cheaper models are great. But if you're saying "hey build this relatively complex feature following the 30,000 foot view spec in this markdown doc" then Haiku doesn't work (unless your "complex feature" is just an api endpoint and some UI that consumes it).
I largely agree. But that goes back to my point (albeit with mixed metaphors): there are lots of people who are just hitting things with a jackhammer in lieu of understanding how to properly use a hammer.
I basically never just yolo large code changes, and use my taste and experience to guide the tools along. For this, Haiku is perfectly fine in nearly all circumstances.
It is not that simple; companies retire old models. I wanted to use 5.1 Codex Max to save money and I could not on my subscription.
> I’ve been using Anthropic models exclusively for the last month on a large, realistic codebase, and I can count the number of times I needed to use Opus on one hand. Most of the time, Haiku is fine. About 10% of the time I splurge for Sonnet, and honestly, even some of those are unnecessary.
I mean at some point some people learn...
I was doing Opus for nasty stuff or otherwise at most planning and then using Sonnet to execute.
Buuuuut I'm dealing with a lot of nonstandard use cases and/or sloppy codebases.
Also, at work, Haiku isn't an enabled model.
But also, if I or my employer are paying for premium requests, then they should be served appropriately.
As it stands this announcement smells of "We know our pricing was predatory and here is the rug pull."
My other lesser worry isn't that Opus 4.7 has a 7.5x multi, it's that the multiplier is quoted as an 'introductory' rate.
Haiku is complete crap compared to sonnet in GHCP. A basic task in Haiku takes 3 prompts with a lot of correction. 1 prompt in sonnet. It isn't worth a third of the price if I have to fix it twice.
This thread is pretty quiet for what strikes me as a substantial set of changes with, presumably, more substantial changes still to come for anyone not grandfathered into a Pro plan.
I get the impression that the intersection of HN posters and Copilot users is quite small in practice; that Claude Code and Codex suck up all the oxygen in this room. But it seems plausible we’ll see similar “true costs greatly exceed our current subscription pricing” from Anthropic and OpenAI someday soon…
Using Copilot Pro with Pi, way better and smarter than using Claude Code. I haven't gotten a single e-mail and just wanted to use Opus (I use Sonnet 95% of the time with Opus for issues where Sonnet is struggling) and got an error message. No prior warning, nothing, I'm pissed. They just rugpulled all paying customers man. I liked Copilot because I can plan my usage over a whole month and I'm not "forced" to use it for a week before hitting limits unlike Claude and Codex.
Anthropic literally just removed Claude Code from their Pro plan today, so you're even more right than you know.
Do you have a citation on this? I have a Claude Pro subscription and looked at the comparison page and it says this under Pro: Everything in Free and: Claude Code directly in your codebase Power through tasks with Cowork Higher usage limits Deep research and analysis Memory that carries across conversations
Go to the pricing page: https://claude.com/pricing
It was recently discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47855565
The ux of copilot driving Claude beats Claude Code handily.
I never understood the low visibility.
Expensive ram is annoying. I don't look forward to expensive ai.
Indeed!
I just found out via other news sources, and was surprised I hadn't seen it on HN already.
....
Speaking as someone where he only 'real' option we have at work is Copilot Plugin, but I also use Copilot Plugin at home....
This is a shitty shitty shitty move.
As a personal user, I can now only use Opus 4.7 at a 7.5x 'Introductory' multiplier if I upgrade to pro+, but at work I can still apparently do Opus 4.6 at a 3x Multiplier on my work 'enterprise' account.
Honestly it strikes me as though someone at Github Copilot took Palantir's manifesto to heart; Screw the individual, consolidate power to companies on every level.
> more substantial changes still to come for anyone not grandfathered into a Pro plan
The change applies to existing subscriptions, some paid a year in advance.
You can get a refund, from the article:
> If you hit unexpected limits or these changes just don’t work for you, you can cancel your Pro or Pro+ subscription and you will not be charged for April usage. Please reach out to GitHub support between April 20 and May 20 for a refund.
>and you will not be charged for April usage
They removed this now without notice but Wayback Machine still has it: https://web.archive.org/web/20260420190656/https://github.bl...
Good thing I had just finished migrating all of my workflows to OpenCode for the time being!
It's a shame because the VsCode copilot experience is quite good out of the box compared to all of the other harnesses I've used. But with typical lack of transparency, and sudden, harsh changes... What are they thinking?
After the restrictive rate limiting they've already instituted, I'm simply cancelling and continuing by using providers directly.
Which providers do you use ? I find copilot's prices pretty hard to beat, but if there's something better I'll cancel too.
I've been happy with GLM 5.1
Yesterday, Opus 4.6 cost three credits. You can no longer use 4.6 or 4.5.
Opus 4.7 is available today for 7.5 credits per prompt.
They have also suspended new signups.
After testing all of the major IDEs/tools that integrate with LLMs over the last four weeks, I was happy to settle on Copilot. I, and others, seem to be a lot confident in that decision. Especially since there seems to be no refund path for people who prepaid for a year.
In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.
I'm really curious where all of this lands, and if AI coding tools will be something that only a small percentage can genuinely afford at a competitive level.
> In my 30+ years online, I've never seen an industry change so much in terms of pricing, service levels, etc, as I have the last two months.
Warning: baseless speculation/theorizing ahead.
This is the consequence of LLM inference being really expensive to run, and LLM inference companies being really attractive to VCs. The VC silly money means their costs are totally decoupled from revenue for a while, but I guess eventually people look at incomings vs outgoings and start asking questions.
Previous big trends like SaaS apps, NFTs, blockchain etc were similarly attractive to VCs (for a period of time at least for the last two, the first one is still pretty attractive to VCs), but nowhere near as expensive to run so the behaviour of the companies running them wasn't quite the same.
AI is still in the "VCs subsidizing everything" -phase.
So:
- DO use AIs to build tools for yourself faster. If the AI goes away, the dashboard and scripts you made will still work.
- DO NOT build your business on top of 3rd party AI services with no way of swapping the backend easily. The question isn't whether there's going to be a "rug-pull", but when it happens. It might be sudden like this one or gradual where they just pump up the price like boiling a frog.
So this is pretty devastating to my general workflows [1] right now, and poorly timed to boot, with no wind-down at all.
It was clear (see the linked post from 70 days ago) that the current offering was unsustainable, but I'm a bit taken aback at how sharp the clawback is.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938246
Yes, Github's per-request pricing was insane; anyone suggesting using CC instead or asking if any other provider is as cheap just doesn't understand the insanity. Clearly losing a lot of money on the people making good use of it.
I was actually hoping they would change it to something that more closely tracks their actual costs so that they wouldn't have to rug-pull this badly. In particular what was really bad about it was that sending prompts to agents while they were working (to give them corrections) cost extra so I stopped doing that (after initially OpenCode didn't cause billing for that, until they became official).
This is quite the rug pull.
I've been using the Pro+ with Opus 4.6 very successfully and being charged 3x rate was mostly acceptable.
But removing Opus 4.6 and replacing with Opus 4.7 with a 7x rate is just insane!
Note that the 7.5x multiplier is only for the promotional period (until end of April), then it'll get even worse. If I had to guess it'll be priced at 10x.
It really seems like the cheap inference is coming to a head very quickly.
I guess it makes more sense for me to just get Claude Pro instead. I was using my Copilot license only because of Opus 4.6 access as all other models seemed crippled in comparison in Copilot; does not even make sense to upgrade to Pro+ which goes from $10/mo to $40/mo and only gives you access to a model that has 7x the rate - 5x the limit at 7x the rate for 4x the price does not seem appealing at all.
Claude Pro no longer includes Claude Code
where have you read this? According to https://claude.com/pricing/pro it is included.
According to https://claude.com/pricing it no longer is. They’ve explicitly updated that page to exclude it (it was on there before)
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mjzxwfx3qs2a
I wouldn't mind this change that much if opus-4.7 worked properly in copilot cli. It keeps stopping mid-thought or task and forces me to waste more prompts for no observable reason.
Looks like I'm ending my subscription, good (likely too good, no way my account was even remotely within profitable range) access to opus-4.6 was the only reason I used this at all.
Are you using through regular copilot (the 'local' agent type), or through the separate claude agent type (which I believe you have to activate in your repository settings on github).
I had the exact same issues with the latter - randomly stops working, wipes chat history, just generally seems to be totally broken. But the former works totally fine and still lets you select sonnet/opus. My experience was before this recent 4.6 -> 4.7 change though.
Welp. I already added a $20 Claude Pro subscription to complement my $10 Github Copilot Pro subscription and $10 DuckDuckGo Plus. That was partly to show support for Anthropic after the OpenAI/DOD episode, but also because I've been using Opus 4.5 exclusively with Copilot and I figured I should try Claude Code eventually.
Now it's going to cost me an upgrade to $39 Github Pro+ to keep using Opus, and even then it's with much higher multipliers. I don't fully understand the extent to which this reflects actual costs for Opus versus Microsoft leveraging network effects to discourage the usage of a competitor.
I didn't really want to wander outside of VSCode just yet because I was happy with VSCode/Copilot/Opus-4.5 and I don't want to spend all my time experimenting when stuff is changing so fast. But I guess my hand has been forced.
>$39 Github Pro+ to keep using Opus,
For what its worth, i have been paying for Pro+ and i still got locked out of Opus. I only have access to Opus 4.7 at 7.5x
> I didn't really want to wander outside of VSCode just yet because I was happy with VSCode/Copilot/Opus-4.5
This was my first thought too but apparently you can just use Claude Code within VSC: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code
You can also use Claude Code in a VS Code terminal window, which I much prefer for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. Granted, I’ve moved to Zed in the past few months. I’m doing the same there.
I've started messing with this and the experience seems pretty similar.
So much for using my secondary Copilot plan with VSCode to hammer Opus 4.6 on a per-request basis.
The joke is on them, though (maybe) because this also means that there's literally no reason to keep that account active.
It's quite cheap at $10 at 1000 premium requests (1 request is like a plan mode + implementation + tests + commit & push). The only problem is I have already used it all, but was billed on the 3rd day of the month, and have to wait till next month to use it.
Props to them for being transparent about it.
I cannot describe how disappointing it is to be switching to this insane time limit window based pricing. I absolutely abhor that I'll be subjected to 5 hour chunks of time where I'll be limited at some point in that window of time, and be told I'll have to wait. And then there is a weekly limit.
That's not how my creative energy works. I have time that I want to solve problems, and I want to solve them. I don't want a cooldown timer applied to solving a problem. Not to mention the anxiety of realizing that while I sleep I could have burned tokens in that time.
I'm incredibly disappointed when I sat down to my hobbyist programming time and realized copilot was suddenly and dramatically changed in a way that is incredibly disheartening.
Meter my token usage DON'T tell me when I can use them! ARGH.
Agreed. WTF is the point of offering a certain # of messages on each plan tier if you're then rate limited and can't even make full use of them?
> I'm incredibly disappointed when I sat down to my hobbyist programming time and realized copilot was suddenly and dramatically changed in a way that is incredibly disheartening.
Guess it’s time to rediscover the lost art of programming without an LLM.
I consider migrating to claude, what a shame they dont have a github copilot plus like price tier.
I saw some Reddit rumours going around and locked myself into the yearly Pro+
I guess overall probably was a good decision.
But 7.5x as well as quota limits is pretty hard to swallow.
The annoying thing about the quota limits is they make it really awkward to actually fully utilize the 1500 premium requests you are paying for.
Like if you don’t plan working around the daily and weekly quotas you may not actually be able to utilize your full request allocation.
Claude has the same issue. Single session blows through the quota.
Yeah I'm a bit confused by the double quota/rate limit situation
Worst part is them doing this mid-billing cycle and not at the start of the next in 11 days. I cancelled and requested a refund.
I cannot understand people still using anthropic models on copilot, when gpt 5.4 is better and 3 to 7 time cheaper. Anthropic quite obviously raised their licensing to the max. You probably can still have a taste of it for a few minutes before being limited on their own subscription.
Simple, for what I'm doing Opus 4.6 (and before that, Opus 4.5) are just much better at following my instructions and achieve consistently better results.
From what I've been gathering, this split in success seems to depend a lot on the types of tasks, the domains / programming languages / frameworks used, and style of prompting.
I couldn't get 5.2 to follow instructions for the life of me, even when repeating multiple times to do / not do something. 5.3-codex was an improvement and 5.4 while _usually_ decent still regularly forgets, goes on unnecessary tangents, or otherwise repeatedly stops just to ask for continuation.
Sure, I'm paying 3x more per request, but I'm also doing 5x fewer requests.
Or well, used to. Still bummed about them dropping 4.6.
My experience is similar. Opus, especially Opus 4.5, understands my intentions better even when poorly phrased, and more consistently follows my instructions to do only what's necessary and no more.
As far as I can tell, the distinctive feature of my workflow is that I'm giving it small, contained single-commit-sized tasks and limited context. For instance: "For all controller `output()` functions under `Controller/Edit/` and `Controller/Report/`, ensure that they check `Auth::userCanManage`." Others seem to be taking bigger swings.
GPT's output is awful and it gets even more awful when you try to work out a solution "together" because it shits out 10 paragraphs with 20 options instead of focusing and getting things done.
Anecdotally, I experimented GPT-5.4 xhigh and something about the code it wrote just didn't vibe with me.
It felt like I constantly have to go back and either fix things or I just didn't like the results. Like the forward momentum/progress on my projects overally wasn't there over time. Even with tho its cheaper it just doesn't feel worth it, to the point I start to feel negative emotions.
I'm actually a bit worried that I've somehow become to feel more negative emotions with agentic coding. Quicker to feel frustrated somehow when things aren't working.
Same for me. I would still be happy with my Copilot Pro subscription if I could use 5.4 with 1x coefficient (and 5.4 mini with 0.33x).
But seeing that they are stopping to get new subscriptions, and rumours/evidence that they plan to increase coefficients of remaining models, it seems they want us to see "the writing on the wall"
This is some shit, coming with 0 notice at the start of a work week. My exposure to Claude is only via Copilot which has worked very well for my purposes. I didn't have to learn a ton for it to just start working. I guess I'll look into other options now as I really want to continue using Opus, but don't have a need to 4x my spend on Copilot quite yet.
I'm not surprised at all. This was one of the most generous plans out there, offering frankly ridiculous pricing based on a single prompt regardless of turns taken or tokens used. I was subscribed for a month around Christmas and got a shitload of tokens out of Opus 4.5 for a measly $10.
I have a GitHub Copilot subscription and this really sucks.
I subscribed two months ago, frustrated with Claude Code and their tight session limits.
The Copilot offer was unbeatable 100 dollars for a 12 months plan, if I remember correctly.
It was pretty clear they were losing money, but hey, it's Microsoft and they need customers, so a competitive push on pricing is expected.
Let's see what these limits look like and I'll decide whether to cancel my subscription or not.
Still a terrible move from them.
I have Copilot Pro+ and discovered i cannot use Opus anymore today! Are we reaching the end of VC funded productivity?
If you’re a paying customer, it’s paying customer funded, not VC funded.
That is not necessarily true.
Removing access to opus is pretty funny. At least they recognize it’s unacceptable and tell you to go get a refund.
The per-request model was pretty insane.
Damn it was good while it lasted, but it was obvious the previous per request pricing scheme was misaligned with their actual costs. MS's product people must be seriously detached from their technical and financial people for it to have even lasted this long (or they're willing to burn a lot of money for the typical "make customers happy and then rug pull" cycle, but hey, Hanlons razor).
Given that they've already silently had session + weekly rate limits for the past couple weeks already at least (I've hit them), I wonder if this change is just making them visible to the user, or if it's actually tightening them too.
If it's the former then I can say they're still significantly more generous than claude pro (on the pro+ plan), so this might be okay. If it's the latter, and the new limits are similar to claude pro then copilot is going to be significantly less useful to me.
how is it possible to have 126 points and still 26 karma, is it voter ring or bots? @dang
It's quite telling, they've paused new signups because Microsoft doesn't have enough compute, and they moved Opus to only being accessible on a higher tier because Anthropic doesn't have enough compute either.
They're all operating at a loss, enshittification is coming for us all.