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?
I'm wondering if they're basically saying they're going to give $10/month free API credits to students and open source maintainers and so on... while otherwise getting out of the consumer portion of this space.
How would that be? They are already charging as much as the underlying providers. They can hardly expect to have any customers if they are charging more.
Lots of us have noticed that usage limits for Claude have been nerfed in recent weeks/months.
If anything, these new multipliers are more transparent than anything OpenAI or Anthropic have communicated regarding actual costs and give us a more realistic understanding of what it's costing these providers.
The fact that we were able to get such a substantial amount of usage for $20/$100/$200 a month was never meant to last and to think otherwise was perhaps a bit naive.
This feels like a strategy from the ZIRP era of tech growth where companies burned investor capital and gave away their products and services for free (or subsidized them heavily) in order to prioritize user acquisition initially. Then once they'd gained enough traction and stickiness they'd then implement a monetization strategy to capitalize on said user base.
However, inference costs for entirely good enough models are likely to keep declining in the future. We're probably hitting diminishing returns on model size and training. The new generations aren't quantum leaps anymore, and newer generations of open source models like DeepSeek are likely to start getting good enough.
There's going to be a limit to how much they can raise prices, because someone can always build out a datacenter and fill it up with open source DeepSeek inference and undercut your prices by 10x while still making a very good ROI--and that's a business model right there. Right now I'm sure there's a lot of people who will protest that they couldn't do their jobs with lesser models, but as time goes on that will get less and less. Already right now the consumers who are using AI for writing presentations, cooking recipe generation and ELI5 answers for common things, aren't going to be missing much from a lesser model. That'll actually only start to get cheaper over time.
Also for business needs, as AI inference costs escalate there comes a point where businesses rediscover human intelligence again, and start hiring/training people to do more work to use lesser models--if that is more productive in the end than shelling out large amounts of cash for inference on the latest models. [Although given how much companies waste on AWS, there's a lot of tolerance for overspending in corporations...]
> because someone can always build out a datacenter and fill it up with open source DeepSeek inference and undercut your prices by 10x while still making a very good ROI-
Not sure how it all works out. Currently trillion dollar companies can't make a native app for platforms. Everything is just JS/Electron because economics does not work for them.
And here companies can make GW data center running very expensive GPUs for 1/10th of current prices. Sound little fanciful to me.
And at some point even frontier model costs will hopefully come down (if there is still a meaningful difference between closed and open source models at that point) as all of the compute that's being built out right now comes online.
If/when it gets to the point where can replace a skilled worker, the service can be sold for pretty much the same price as that skilled labour. But the AI can run 24/7, reliably, and scale up/down at a moments notice.
There's not going to be much competition. Someone will win the race and end up a monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best.
Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.
But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement
"This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users."
I see statements like this as strong indicators that the sales people are wrapping up their work and the accountants are taking over. The land rush is switching to an operational efficiency play.
27x for Opus is genuinely shocking. at that point you're not paying for convenience anymore, you're just paying a GitHub tax. OpenRouter or direct API makes way more sense unless you're really glued to the IDE integration.
Does it effectively bypass regional restrictions for you, so you can use something like the Claude API from unsupported regions such as Hong Kong, or does it still enforce the official providers' geo-restrictions?
OpenRouter is great for budget control, but as they are indirect APIs, your experience with cached tokens may vary, eventually costing much more than in direct depending on the providers.
You can pay with crypto though, which seems to be convenient for people under sanctions or with limited access, or if you are in low-tax jurisdiction (e.g. HK)
That said I think few people using openrouter are actually being selective about providers.
It took half a day to get my opencode setup, was not friendly. A lot of manually cross referencing model and providers. I was actually mainly optimizing for relatively fast providers. It all is super fragile and I'm sure half out of date; I have no idea if these picks are still fast, no promises they are still the same price (pretty terrifying honestly).
I'm mostly on coding plans so it doesn't super affect me. But man is it a bother to maintain.
One theory of the play of SpaceX might do if everyone migrates to query-based billing:
Provide cheap and unlimited access to Grok for programmers (hence the Cursor partnership/purchase for distribution).
-> This would drag massive revenue right before the IPO announcement, like if the company is super growing
-> At a loss, but don't worry, we need these funds to build the biggest datacenter of the universe.
This announcement would create enough momentum to increase valuation, and because of the merge of his companies, would save his X/Twitter investors from a tragedy.
-> Would also be a great service to Cursor investors and so, who are stuck with their VSCode fork
What's annoying is that it's obvious. In the case of GPT 5.5, if Copilot is going to charge 7.5x what GPT 5.4 costs while OpenAI themselves via the API/Codex only charges 2x of what GPT 5.4 costs, that will immediately raise an eyebrow.
To anybody who's been watching the tech sector with a critical eye for pretty much any period from the late 90s and onward, this is just the enshittification process. For most of OpenAI's existence it's been obvious, to me, that investors were burning insane levels of capital to build the market, and now that folks are locked in, you're seeing higher fees, ads, etc. Yet again, the user is the product; the investors want to siphon your data, attention and once you're hooked, money. And for companies like Microsoft and Apple, those hooks can dig deep.
If you paid attention to the power requirements and amount of hardware being put into data centers, you should have realized that it cost them an order of magnitude more than you were being charged. To rework your analogy: they hooked you, now they're gonna see if they can reel you in.
They can only reel you in if its worth it. I still can code.
And while i do not spend 200$ privat, in my startup we discussed this and our current mental model is, that instead of hiring someone new, we prefer to have more money for tokens.
This is easier for us and has a bigger benefit. The cost of a new / first employee is very high, a 200$ subscription is not. Upgrading that to lets say 400 or 800$ is still alot easier and if i can run multiply and better agents with that money, lets goooo.
I'm looking at education -- teachers and students, not terribly tech savvy, are being mandated to use these tools. And then comes the rug-pull. It was worth it, but now it's outside of their budget. Poorer schools / students can't stay at the cutting edge; richer schools / students can.
“Enshitification” is just when unsustainable subsidies end?
Another reason to hate that word.
From a different perspective, you were granted an incredible gift from the companies who let you use their product on their dime. Hopefully you made the most of it when you had the opportunity.
That's so unfair to us hard working developers. A month ago i could buy for .4$ a turn with Sonnet. Now i have to pay at least .9$ for this turn. Weeks ago i could buy for .12$ an Opus turn after they already raised prices and now they want .27$ from me for the same product! They are stealing from us!
They aren't stealing from us, for several reasons. First of all, it's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like the prices, use something else. Or don't use AI at all.
Second, you have no idea what their costs are. It is most likely that they are simply passing on their costs to you. If that was not the setup, users would just go to another service provider who was providing tokens at a cheaper rate. It's not like there is a dearth of competitors in this business.
"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?
Or if you're a business with multiple seats, these plans may be more inefficient than raw API usage billing. Since if anyone at your organization fails to utilize their full $19/39 allotment each month, that's wasting money, whereas with API credits it is 100% utilized.
I don't think they've thought through the implications of this. Everyone should cancel and go usage-based billing with caps.
They do address this in the doc, Orgs can now (although it was vague as to whether it was an option or just the new standard, probably option due to business contracts) 'pool' the Usage billing across all users.
I'm guessing they did that (and the 'temporary bonus credits') to make the pill easier to swallow for that side of customers.
This was my first thought too. "Oh cool, I should be seeing lower prices" as I don't use Co-pilot that often anymore. But no, that's not the case. It rather served to remind me that I should probably just cancel.
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.
"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.
This may be a more accurate analogy... "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo now only allows you a maximum of 100km of travel. You will be automatically charged extra when you go over that."
On top of being worth less, the subscriber discounts are gone.
The old plans were $0.033/request for Pro, $0.026/request for Pro+ and $0.04/request for pay-as-you-go. That discount is now gone. They even still advertise "5x the number of requests" for Pro+ over Pro.
Yeah, if I go to a petrol station with 50€, but only get a tenth of the amount of petrol I got last week, I may think that the price has in fact 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.
I’m actually trying to move back from the Claude Code style, I feel like it’s easy to become distant from your own code, and I am feeling uncomfortable with that.
I’ve “vibe-coded” some projects and when I start to find issues or go to refactor them I don’t have that memory of why decisions were made, because many decisions were never made.
> I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code.
I use Claude Code, but I kept my Copilot subscription around mostly for really cheap usage of other models when I need to try a different one (which appears to be ending, in a sense) and also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files, I could make changes in one file and then just tab through some others.
I wonder what other good autocomplete is out there.
I've used it quite a bit. There are a lot of AI terminal coding products and this is another one. It works well, handles sub-agents without issue and does a reasonable job operating in the Copilot ecosystem. It handles mid-task questions and such we well.
But its a really good UI for agentic coding. Not sure why more people don't use it. I've tried the others and keep coming back to Copilot chat. It's a really good tool. Which is why the rugpull on pricing is so concerning.
The other cool thing is Copilot SDK, so you can build agentic capabilities into apps, or build tools, that leverage the agent harness of the Copilot CLI:
The vs code integration is pretty slick. I can copy and paste function names into the prompt and it automatically turns them into these `#sym:` reference objects that I presume populate the context window with metadata about the function and where it lives. It knows what file I'm currently looking at as I jump around in the code, and that automatically gets loaded into the context. I can also drag and drop folders or specific files for context into the sidebar.
It's a lot of stuff that makes me have to type less into the prompt, since it's already getting so much info from my editor
I'm just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7
I don't know about others, but I use Copilot more often than other apps because of its tight integration with the VS Code itself where I still spend most of my time working on other things while letting AI do some task that I decided to delegate to it.
I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.
Search has become so bad that I also struggled to find Claude Code alternative and made my own tight (not editors, not plugins, not agents, strictly similar to Claude Code CLI) list: https://github.com/omarabid/cli-llm-coding
The list is not long but there are quite a few options. Even Grok has its own CLI!
The reality is, even though a CLI prompt looks very simple, it's a very complex piece of software. I personally use Claude Code (with GLM) and anything else I have tried was significantly inferior (with the exception of opencode).
> 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 wouldn't call it hindsight - I don't think anyone, at any stage, thought running a 10 minute+ sonnet session for 1 premium credit was ever profitable. We all knew it was a loss leader to get people using it.
It would have been profitable if that premium credit cost more than a negotiated discounted rate with Anthropic. We have no way of knowing if there were negotiated rates though!
Guys, you're discussing a house of cards to begin with: No matter how you're paying for the $CURRENTSOTA you're not garunteed that next month what you pay for will be the same.
So, lets do some honest evaluations:
1. The model itself is a non-deterministic engine of work with an unknown value; it's real value is just magic.
2. The business model itself is non-deterministic engine of profit with a known value; whatever the VCs have put into it, _must_ be piulled out. If Ed Zitron's numbers are correct, circa 2030, it's several trillion dollars.
So do some matrix multiplication of non-determinism vs determinism, and realize that the value proposition for _you_ is only going to decrease because #1 can never outpace #2, ensuring enshittification captures a smaller and smaller whale.
We know this. This has been the last 2 decades of money extraction from software. It was ok when it was some 12 year old's parents CC. But now it's you, or your business, that's going to either ben squeeze for value or squeeze out of the market.
And everyones squabbling about the color of the cost.
ok
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.
Yeah, this was my frustration with Suno and Sora. You can burn a lot of credits (not to mention time) generating things that aren't what you wanted.
I don't mind a PAYG model for a simple chat interface. But when it comes to actually producing things, you burn through TONS of tokens creating the wrong output.
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.
Subsidies stop when LLMs improvement plateaued (though they still benchmark higher somehow). At some point, you have to make money or at least break even; and I think they concluded that we reached that point.
As someone that is on the enterprise side in a non-tech F500 company, what I'm seeing is some FOMO and need to be part of the hype cycle. We're about to plonk a bunch of money on more Copilot licenses. Something got in the water where all the C-levels the past two months are pushing everyone to use AI but when they bring up examples of their uses its like "I use it to rewrite my emails" or prompt 'engineering' ideas that point more to patching over poor processes, data management, and decision-making within the organization or not.
What we're seeing across the board is every software company tossing AI onto their name or sales pitch and no one understanding what that actually means. But we will spend money on it because of FOMO.
I really question if we're reaching the end of the hype cycle to the point. I wish I were brave enough to put money on it. It feels like there was a command from up top to 'do something with AI' and leadership is scambling for some resume-building projects vs doing the hard work they should've done the past two years at a people and process level.
One reason I used it was that I wasn't locked into a single provider and switching them was as easy as changing a drop-down. Small feature? Sonnet or GPT5.4/mini? Large changes? Opus. And why not see how good Raptor Mini does this one refactor?
It also helped build an intuition of what wach model could do and which parts it was weaker at because you could try them almost side by side, especially if one model's output wasn't great.
That said, these were all side projects so nothing truly consequential. Otoh, you might leave some extra perf on the table but I found the models worked quite with the Copilot harness.
Yeah, this is a very useful abstraction layer. The entire concept of separating the model creator from the model runner is good for competition and is customer friendly. Which means they likely hate the concept and want to kill it.
Gosh, imagine getting to do that with your TV/Streaming subscription. Getting to pay one fee to access some set number of hours per month from any of the providers.
The problem is I can't afford the tokens! Even on my $10/mo plan, running either 100 opus, or 300 sonnet agent runs would cost hundreds of dollars - well above my budget!
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.
I do love using local models when I can, but qwen-35B is the best model I can run, and while its an insanely good local model, it does not compare to the big ones.
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.
The point is - if its the same or more expensive per month than a real human employee - why pay for AI ?
Human retain knowledge, product knowledge, can pick up more work often for the same money. And having many of them means your business wont go down if provider suddenly bumps API pricing.
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.
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.
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.
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 think that only applies to held-over users on the annual plan:
> Users on annual Pro or Pro+ plans will remain on their existing plan with premium request-based pricing until their plan expires, however, model multipliers will increase on June 1 (see table).
It isn't just the big multiplier increase, they also say "...and no new models or features will be added to annual plans going forward."
Can you imagine ten months from now and you're still rolling Sonnet 4.6?
Cancel/refund is looking pretty good. They're doing refunds until May 20.
"To request a refund, go to Settings → Billing and licensing → Licensing, select Manage subscription, then choose Cancel and refund "subscription". (The phrasing varies slightly depending on your subscription ). This option will be available until May 20."
It is an apples for apples comparison since those new multipliers only count if you are on an annual plan in which case the premium request system stays in place until you either cancel and get a refund or until your renewal comes up. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/usage-ba...
Those multipliers will only apply if you are currently on an annual subscription (and only until your renewal comes up or you cancel). So I assume they simply want to make it as unattractive as possible to get most people to cancel it and move to the token based system.
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?
One nice development recently was ollama's support for MLX optimization on Mac hardware. It's not obvious how to know you're using a model that works with it, yet, so it's rough around the edges.
On my personal account, Copilot Pro+ still only gave me back Opus 4.7, whereas my work's Pro account still lets me use Opus 4.6.
So, my gut says, it's entirely possible that Pro+ will continue to have more segregation on model availability...
FTA
> Last week, we also rolled out temporary changes to Copilot Individual plans, including Free, Pro, Pro+, and Student, and paused self-serve Copilot Business plan purchases. These were reliability and performance measures as we prepare for the broader transition to usage-based billing. We will loosen usage limits once usage-based billing is in effect.
There's enough weasel wording here that I would expect only certain models get re-enabled on Pro.
e.x. lots of people seem to get good enough results from Opus 4.6, personally I prefer it over 4.7 in GH Copilot... locking that down to Pro+ would be, given this salvo of enshittification, a 'logical' move on their part.
I doubt you can force them to provide the service with the original terms, but you might be able to ask for a (partial) refund. If not today, after a week of verbal abuse they will receive for this online.
It depends where you’re located. In the EU they have to honor the contract you entered, but presumably there is a clause that they can prematurely terminate the contract without cause and give you all of your money back (from the start of the contract).
My thought exactly! First the usage limits + model limitations and now fundamental change to the billing. Hope some consumer watchdogs are looking into this!
That was the first thing I turned off in VSCode. Autocomplete for my TypeScript projects was great. And the "AI" suggestions/completions were really getting in the way of me still being the "driver."
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.
We all knew this from the very beginning but couldn't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on their subscription-based pricing strategy. It was nuts except for those few corporations burning investor money to keep competition out as long as possible. Now they don't have to hide anymore that subscription pricing won't do it for ai. The pyramid scheme is falling.
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?
So we left the times when we struggled to estimate the return of investment on all the predicted LLM tokrns usage to the times when we even don't know for sure how much tokens for the same amount of money?
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.
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.
It made more sense in the ye old days where a request was basically just a chat message in a sidebar and it could also edit code. Then saying someone can use 300 chat messages a month kinda makes sense.
Turns out when a request can spawn tens of subagents and use millions of tokens over many turns of toolcalls then suddenly github copilot has a massive financial problem on their hands.
This approach started with the “Ask a question about your code” feature, which is more comparable to single chat message with relatively predictable token usage. Now it’s an agent who might work for 30 minutes, read the whole codebase, and write 1000 lines
I'm not usually a Conspiracy Guy, and the answer is probably `incompetence * tech_debt`. But I think that having sufficient layers of abstraction to any billing model is a useful way to hide the real cost of things. It's why it's done everywhere.
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.
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.
That's my point. They made those decisions without any consideration for the long run, which would have required them to project the cost of AI services years into the future. Obviously management didn't do that and had no way to do that. It made current earnings look good, though, which was enough for them when they made the decision.
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
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.
Yeah, local is clearly the future. Even beyond the cheap Chinese models you can install the apfel[1] stuff if you're on a mac and want a quick available onboard cli option. And I'm sure people will adapt the Flash-MoE[2] integration to be even better soon as well.
Re 1: Current models don't solve coding. They are useful tool for it though.
Re 2: Open weight models seem to be less than a year behind proprietary ones, so sure, if you're willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a super computer that you probably don't fully utilize instead of renting time on someone else's super computer for a lot less.
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?
It's less surprise, but more confusing given the game theory as their competitors are not doing the same thing and the multiplier changes alone will likely churn current users.
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
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...
I'm wondering if they're basically saying they're going to give $10/month free API credits to students and open source maintainers and so on... while otherwise getting out of the consumer portion of this space.
I'm thinking the same. Downgrade to Pro and use OpenRouter (same price) for overage.
Seems a massive loss for Microsoft. Presumably there's a further rugpull to come.
> Presumably there's a further rugpull to come.
How would that be? They are already charging as much as the underlying providers. They can hardly expect to have any customers if they are charging more.
I'm already on Pro. Why should I keep it?
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.
Everyone seems to believe OpenRouter isn't subsidizing but until they genuinely publish audited financials I personally doubt it.
Lots of us have noticed that usage limits for Claude have been nerfed in recent weeks/months.
If anything, these new multipliers are more transparent than anything OpenAI or Anthropic have communicated regarding actual costs and give us a more realistic understanding of what it's costing these providers.
The fact that we were able to get such a substantial amount of usage for $20/$100/$200 a month was never meant to last and to think otherwise was perhaps a bit naive.
This feels like a strategy from the ZIRP era of tech growth where companies burned investor capital and gave away their products and services for free (or subsidized them heavily) in order to prioritize user acquisition initially. Then once they'd gained enough traction and stickiness they'd then implement a monetization strategy to capitalize on said user base.
However, inference costs for entirely good enough models are likely to keep declining in the future. We're probably hitting diminishing returns on model size and training. The new generations aren't quantum leaps anymore, and newer generations of open source models like DeepSeek are likely to start getting good enough.
There's going to be a limit to how much they can raise prices, because someone can always build out a datacenter and fill it up with open source DeepSeek inference and undercut your prices by 10x while still making a very good ROI--and that's a business model right there. Right now I'm sure there's a lot of people who will protest that they couldn't do their jobs with lesser models, but as time goes on that will get less and less. Already right now the consumers who are using AI for writing presentations, cooking recipe generation and ELI5 answers for common things, aren't going to be missing much from a lesser model. That'll actually only start to get cheaper over time.
Also for business needs, as AI inference costs escalate there comes a point where businesses rediscover human intelligence again, and start hiring/training people to do more work to use lesser models--if that is more productive in the end than shelling out large amounts of cash for inference on the latest models. [Although given how much companies waste on AWS, there's a lot of tolerance for overspending in corporations...]
> because someone can always build out a datacenter and fill it up with open source DeepSeek inference and undercut your prices by 10x while still making a very good ROI-
Not sure how it all works out. Currently trillion dollar companies can't make a native app for platforms. Everything is just JS/Electron because economics does not work for them.
And here companies can make GW data center running very expensive GPUs for 1/10th of current prices. Sound little fanciful to me.
I think so too.
And at some point even frontier model costs will hopefully come down (if there is still a meaningful difference between closed and open source models at that point) as all of the compute that's being built out right now comes online.
I hope it's true, but right now hardware prices are insane
I guess the new models will still be quantum leaps, but literally: "The smallest possible change in a system"
It does feel like the music is about to stop.
It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.
Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?
If/when it gets to the point where can replace a skilled worker, the service can be sold for pretty much the same price as that skilled labour. But the AI can run 24/7, reliably, and scale up/down at a moments notice.
There's not going to be much competition. Someone will win the race and end up a monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best.
Yeah, totally. The recent pricing changes have just made my Copilot subscription go from great deal to awful value over night.
I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.
Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.
But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement
Wow thats a lot for routing traffic.
And handling API tokens, and billing, and reliability, and middleware. I am not affiliated with them but it’s not “just” routing.
Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.
Payment processing likely eats up at least 2-3% of that
"This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users."
I see statements like this as strong indicators that the sales people are wrapping up their work and the accountants are taking over. The land rush is switching to an operational efficiency play.
The sooner the better. Let's take a look at the long term, enshittified, viable product before we get too dependent on the trial version.
And enshitification starts.
Even Sonnet 4.6 is 9x multiplier (previously 1x)!
The only model I even used on Copilot was Sonnet and now its got a ridiculous multiplier.
At this point they might as well just charge per Million tokens like every other provider instead of having a subscription.
> At this point they might as well just charge per Million tokens like every other provider instead of having a subscription.
Pretty sure that's what they will eventually do
27x for Opus is genuinely shocking. at that point you're not paying for convenience anymore, you're just paying a GitHub tax. OpenRouter or direct API makes way more sense unless you're really glued to the IDE integration.
I keep seeing people mention OpenRouter.
Does it effectively bypass regional restrictions for you, so you can use something like the Claude API from unsupported regions such as Hong Kong, or does it still enforce the official providers' geo-restrictions?
OpenRouter is great for budget control, but as they are indirect APIs, your experience with cached tokens may vary, eventually costing much more than in direct depending on the providers.
You can pay with crypto though, which seems to be convenient for people under sanctions or with limited access, or if you are in low-tax jurisdiction (e.g. HK)
Caching is advertised per model+provider.
That said I think few people using openrouter are actually being selective about providers.
It took half a day to get my opencode setup, was not friendly. A lot of manually cross referencing model and providers. I was actually mainly optimizing for relatively fast providers. It all is super fragile and I'm sure half out of date; I have no idea if these picks are still fast, no promises they are still the same price (pretty terrifying honestly).
I'm mostly on coding plans so it doesn't super affect me. But man is it a bother to maintain.
One theory of the play of SpaceX might do if everyone migrates to query-based billing:
Provide cheap and unlimited access to Grok for programmers (hence the Cursor partnership/purchase for distribution).
-> This would drag massive revenue right before the IPO announcement, like if the company is super growing
-> At a loss, but don't worry, we need these funds to build the biggest datacenter of the universe.
This announcement would create enough momentum to increase valuation, and because of the merge of his companies, would save his X/Twitter investors from a tragedy.
-> Would also be a great service to Cursor investors and so, who are stuck with their VSCode fork
They probably want the training data. Otherwise these 60B don't make sense at all.
But they can't buy curser before their IPO so thats that?
Perhaps they have to much compute because Musk overpromised and Twittergroq doesn't need that much compute after he nerved the porn stuff?
It takes longer to build a datacenter with that much capacity than it does for the market to respond.
I don’t get the SpaceX reference. I thought they made rockets?
Nobody is paying for Elons xAI so he used SpaceX to buy xAI to fund it.
They now also own xAI
What's annoying is that it's obvious. In the case of GPT 5.5, if Copilot is going to charge 7.5x what GPT 5.4 costs while OpenAI themselves via the API/Codex only charges 2x of what GPT 5.4 costs, that will immediately raise an eyebrow.
To anybody who's been watching the tech sector with a critical eye for pretty much any period from the late 90s and onward, this is just the enshittification process. For most of OpenAI's existence it's been obvious, to me, that investors were burning insane levels of capital to build the market, and now that folks are locked in, you're seeing higher fees, ads, etc. Yet again, the user is the product; the investors want to siphon your data, attention and once you're hooked, money. And for companies like Microsoft and Apple, those hooks can dig deep.
I'd call it a straight up "bait and switch".
Oh, I thought it was opium.
If you paid attention to the power requirements and amount of hardware being put into data centers, you should have realized that it cost them an order of magnitude more than you were being charged. To rework your analogy: they hooked you, now they're gonna see if they can reel you in.
They can only reel you in if its worth it. I still can code.
And while i do not spend 200$ privat, in my startup we discussed this and our current mental model is, that instead of hiring someone new, we prefer to have more money for tokens.
This is easier for us and has a bigger benefit. The cost of a new / first employee is very high, a 200$ subscription is not. Upgrading that to lets say 400 or 800$ is still alot easier and if i can run multiply and better agents with that money, lets goooo.
I'm looking at education -- teachers and students, not terribly tech savvy, are being mandated to use these tools. And then comes the rug-pull. It was worth it, but now it's outside of their budget. Poorer schools / students can't stay at the cutting edge; richer schools / students can.
“Enshitification” is just when unsustainable subsidies end?
Another reason to hate that word.
From a different perspective, you were granted an incredible gift from the companies who let you use their product on their dime. Hopefully you made the most of it when you had the opportunity.
FYI, these are the multipliers for annual plan. I would hazard a guess most people are not on an annual plan
"eras" tend to not be so short lol
That's so unfair to us hard working developers. A month ago i could buy for .4$ a turn with Sonnet. Now i have to pay at least .9$ for this turn. Weeks ago i could buy for .12$ an Opus turn after they already raised prices and now they want .27$ from me for the same product! They are stealing from us!
They aren't stealing from us, for several reasons. First of all, it's a voluntary transaction. If you don't like the prices, use something else. Or don't use AI at all.
Second, you have no idea what their costs are. It is most likely that they are simply passing on their costs to you. If that was not the setup, users would just go to another service provider who was providing tokens at a cheaper rate. It's not like there is a dearth of competitors in this business.
The already stole when they trained their models on the data.
Now they just increase the price to buy it back
"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?
Yep.
Or if you're a business with multiple seats, these plans may be more inefficient than raw API usage billing. Since if anyone at your organization fails to utilize their full $19/39 allotment each month, that's wasting money, whereas with API credits it is 100% utilized.
I don't think they've thought through the implications of this. Everyone should cancel and go usage-based billing with caps.
They do address this in the doc, Orgs can now (although it was vague as to whether it was an option or just the new standard, probably option due to business contracts) 'pool' the Usage billing across all users.
I'm guessing they did that (and the 'temporary bonus credits') to make the pill easier to swallow for that side of customers.
You're right, I missed that.
It still does make one wonder, why have seats at all though? If everyone is just in one big API credit pool - what do the seats/users accomplish?
For orgs, each user was allotted their own quota. For messages beyond that quota, a pooled budget is available.
They mention in the announcement that it will be possible to pool usage across an organization.
This was my first thought too. "Oh cool, I should be seeing lower prices" as I don't use Co-pilot that often anymore. But no, that's not the case. It rather served to remind me that I should probably just cancel.
They could add rollover balances and be back to cell phone plans in the early 2000s.
Are you thinking something like rollover plans?
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.
Even more so, questions and user answers from agents were not charged as separate requests.
I did many 1h+ sessions of agent asking questions, delegating to subagents - all for 1 premium request.
I would say its a x1000 increase in price for agentic workflows.
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.
"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!"
This may be a more accurate analogy... "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo now only allows you a maximum of 100km of travel. You will be automatically charged extra when you go over that."
more like 100m
On top of being worth less, the subscriber discounts are gone.
The old plans were $0.033/request for Pro, $0.026/request for Pro+ and $0.04/request for pay-as-you-go. That discount is now gone. They even still advertise "5x the number of requests" for Pro+ over Pro.
Yeah, if I go to a petrol station with 50€, but only get a tenth of the amount of petrol I got last week, I may think that the price has in fact changed.
"Your monthly fee isn't changing but it now only covers about 3 days of driving."
More like, the rising gas prices aren’t a problem, I only ever fill up for $40
It's more like saying, "and you may now only use the Porsche for 5 minutes out of every day."
Full brake on the autobahn if you hit your 5min limit
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?
https://github.com/features/copilot/cli
I’m actually trying to move back from the Claude Code style, I feel like it’s easy to become distant from your own code, and I am feeling uncomfortable with that.
I’ve “vibe-coded” some projects and when I start to find issues or go to refactor them I don’t have that memory of why decisions were made, because many decisions were never made.
> I was curious why a company would still use the VS Code + Copilot sidebar method for coding, rather than something like Claude Code.
I use Claude Code, but I kept my Copilot subscription around mostly for really cheap usage of other models when I need to try a different one (which appears to be ending, in a sense) and also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files, I could make changes in one file and then just tab through some others.
I wonder what other good autocomplete is out there.
I've used it quite a bit. There are a lot of AI terminal coding products and this is another one. It works well, handles sub-agents without issue and does a reasonable job operating in the Copilot ecosystem. It handles mid-task questions and such we well.
I’ve tried OpenCode, Claude Code and Codex CLI. But was just shocked that Microsoft has a version I hadn’t even heard of.
Personally I got CLI fatigue and am happy with Conductor for now, but things are moving fast in this space.
The naming is bad. VS Code Copilot Chat.
But its a really good UI for agentic coding. Not sure why more people don't use it. I've tried the others and keep coming back to Copilot chat. It's a really good tool. Which is why the rugpull on pricing is so concerning.
The other cool thing is Copilot SDK, so you can build agentic capabilities into apps, or build tools, that leverage the agent harness of the Copilot CLI:
https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/
The vs code integration is pretty slick. I can copy and paste function names into the prompt and it automatically turns them into these `#sym:` reference objects that I presume populate the context window with metadata about the function and where it lives. It knows what file I'm currently looking at as I jump around in the code, and that automatically gets loaded into the context. I can also drag and drop folders or specific files for context into the sidebar.
It's a lot of stuff that makes me have to type less into the prompt, since it's already getting so much info from my editor
I'm just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7
I don't know about others, but I use Copilot more often than other apps because of its tight integration with the VS Code itself where I still spend most of my time working on other things while letting AI do some task that I decided to delegate to it.
I've used it. It's on par with OpenCode imho.
I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.
Search has become so bad that I also struggled to find Claude Code alternative and made my own tight (not editors, not plugins, not agents, strictly similar to Claude Code CLI) list: https://github.com/omarabid/cli-llm-coding
The list is not long but there are quite a few options. Even Grok has its own CLI!
The reality is, even though a CLI prompt looks very simple, it's a very complex piece of software. I personally use Claude Code (with GLM) and anything else I have tried was significantly inferior (with the exception of opencode).
Because Copilot is the only thing allowed at our corp
It's essentially a carbon copy of Claude Code, but with a 7x multiplier for Opus tokens. Totally unusable compared to a Claude Max plan.
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 wouldn't call it hindsight - I don't think anyone, at any stage, thought running a 10 minute+ sonnet session for 1 premium credit was ever profitable. We all knew it was a loss leader to get people using it.
It would have been profitable if that premium credit cost more than a negotiated discounted rate with Anthropic. We have no way of knowing if there were negotiated rates though!
Guys, you're discussing a house of cards to begin with: No matter how you're paying for the $CURRENTSOTA you're not garunteed that next month what you pay for will be the same.
So, lets do some honest evaluations:
1. The model itself is a non-deterministic engine of work with an unknown value; it's real value is just magic.
2. The business model itself is non-deterministic engine of profit with a known value; whatever the VCs have put into it, _must_ be piulled out. If Ed Zitron's numbers are correct, circa 2030, it's several trillion dollars.
So do some matrix multiplication of non-determinism vs determinism, and realize that the value proposition for _you_ is only going to decrease because #1 can never outpace #2, ensuring enshittification captures a smaller and smaller whale.
We know this. This has been the last 2 decades of money extraction from software. It was ok when it was some 12 year old's parents CC. But now it's you, or your business, that's going to either ben squeeze for value or squeeze out of the market.
And everyones squabbling about the color of the cost. ok
per-request was broken, yeah. but $10 of monthly credits is basically just a prepaid wallet with a reset timer.
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.
Yeah, this was my frustration with Suno and Sora. You can burn a lot of credits (not to mention time) generating things that aren't what you wanted.
I don't mind a PAYG model for a simple chat interface. But when it comes to actually producing things, you burn through TONS of tokens creating the wrong output.
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.
Subsidies stop when LLMs improvement plateaued (though they still benchmark higher somehow). At some point, you have to make money or at least break even; and I think they concluded that we reached that point.
As someone that is on the enterprise side in a non-tech F500 company, what I'm seeing is some FOMO and need to be part of the hype cycle. We're about to plonk a bunch of money on more Copilot licenses. Something got in the water where all the C-levels the past two months are pushing everyone to use AI but when they bring up examples of their uses its like "I use it to rewrite my emails" or prompt 'engineering' ideas that point more to patching over poor processes, data management, and decision-making within the organization or not.
What we're seeing across the board is every software company tossing AI onto their name or sales pitch and no one understanding what that actually means. But we will spend money on it because of FOMO.
I really question if we're reaching the end of the hype cycle to the point. I wish I were brave enough to put money on it. It feels like there was a command from up top to 'do something with AI' and leadership is scambling for some resume-building projects vs doing the hard work they should've done the past two years at a people and process level.
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.
One reason I used it was that I wasn't locked into a single provider and switching them was as easy as changing a drop-down. Small feature? Sonnet or GPT5.4/mini? Large changes? Opus. And why not see how good Raptor Mini does this one refactor?
It also helped build an intuition of what wach model could do and which parts it was weaker at because you could try them almost side by side, especially if one model's output wasn't great.
That said, these were all side projects so nothing truly consequential. Otoh, you might leave some extra perf on the table but I found the models worked quite with the Copilot harness.
Yeah, this is a very useful abstraction layer. The entire concept of separating the model creator from the model runner is good for competition and is customer friendly. Which means they likely hate the concept and want to kill it.
Gosh, imagine getting to do that with your TV/Streaming subscription. Getting to pay one fee to access some set number of hours per month from any of the providers.
The problem is I can't afford the tokens! Even on my $10/mo plan, running either 100 opus, or 300 sonnet agent runs would cost hundreds of dollars - well above my budget!
Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?
Economics of scale don't work when scale still isn't enough and capacity is still limited.
GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.
It seems to me more expensive but I might be reading it wrong.
Looking at their pricing it does not look the case.
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.
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.
Sounds like you're a candidate for a local model. It's kinda nice not caring what the token count means except as to compaction.
I do love using local models when I can, but qwen-35B is the best model I can run, and while its an insanely good local model, it does not compare to the big ones.
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)
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.
The point is - if its the same or more expensive per month than a real human employee - why pay for AI ?
Human retain knowledge, product knowledge, can pick up more work often for the same money. And having many of them means your business wont go down if provider suddenly bumps API pricing.
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.
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.
Same! I wonder what other alternatives there might be for autocomplete.
If you find out, please let me know!
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.
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.
Current multipliers vs from June
EDIT: only applies to annual plansI think that only applies to held-over users on the annual plan:
> Users on annual Pro or Pro+ plans will remain on their existing plan with premium request-based pricing until their plan expires, however, model multipliers will increase on June 1 (see table).
There will surely be corresponding, different AI credit costs for each model.
"AI credits" are just US cents. The cost per model is here - and it looks like it is just the API providers API cost: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...
Thanks this is helpful. I am on my first month of annual Pro. Should I keep it or cancel it (ask for a refund)?
It isn't just the big multiplier increase, they also say "...and no new models or features will be added to annual plans going forward."
Can you imagine ten months from now and you're still rolling Sonnet 4.6?
Cancel/refund is looking pretty good. They're doing refunds until May 20.
"To request a refund, go to Settings → Billing and licensing → Licensing, select Manage subscription, then choose Cancel and refund "subscription". (The phrasing varies slightly depending on your subscription ). This option will be available until May 20."
Appreciate the info. Have you got a similar opinion of the 'convert to monthly' option they've also provided?
Not apples for apples.
Before:
- Opus 4.6 each premium request is 3 premium requests
After:
- Opus 4.6 each dollar spent is 27 dollars in copilot AI Credits.
Given that you'll receive 19 dollars of AI Credits in Business plan, that means you can probably say 1 "hi" to opus per month.
It is an apples for apples comparison since those new multipliers only count if you are on an annual plan in which case the premium request system stays in place until you either cancel and get a refund or until your renewal comes up. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/usage-ba...
If you are not on an annual plan, multipliers will be gone completely. You can see the rates that apply instead here: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...
Thanks for that link. Oddly the blog post didn't contain any of this information.
Based on the pricing and comparing to competitors e.g. bedrock[1] looks like cache-write will only be on 5 minute TTL.
[1]: https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/
GPT 5.4mini is even worse, from 0.33x to 6x which is ~18 times more expensive now.
GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 mini are now the same price, which, why?
Those multipliers will only apply if you are currently on an annual subscription (and only until your renewal comes up or you cancel). So I assume they simply want to make it as unattractive as possible to get most people to cancel it and move to the token based system.
GPT 4.1 had a multiplier of 0.
vindication! https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-microsoft-moving-all-g...
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?
One nice development recently was ollama's support for MLX optimization on Mac hardware. It's not obvious how to know you're using a model that works with it, yet, so it's rough around the edges.
https://ollama.com/blog/mlx
It was just a matter of time, considering how many Mtok you could consume in just 300 prompts.
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?
Some models, for example Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, are only available on Pro+; Pro+ has audit logs and GitHub Spark; that's about it, as far as I can tell from https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/copilot/g...
If I had to guess...
On my personal account, Copilot Pro+ still only gave me back Opus 4.7, whereas my work's Pro account still lets me use Opus 4.6.
So, my gut says, it's entirely possible that Pro+ will continue to have more segregation on model availability...
FTA
> Last week, we also rolled out temporary changes to Copilot Individual plans, including Free, Pro, Pro+, and Student, and paused self-serve Copilot Business plan purchases. These were reliability and performance measures as we prepare for the broader transition to usage-based billing. We will loosen usage limits once usage-based billing is in effect.
There's enough weasel wording here that I would expect only certain models get re-enabled on Pro.
e.x. lots of people seem to get good enough results from Opus 4.6, personally I prefer it over 4.7 in GH Copilot... locking that down to Pro+ would be, given this salvo of enshittification, a 'logical' move on their part.
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.
Still no chips coming from Microslop
Google won
How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?
100% it says in their terms that they can change the service during the agreement.
In order to most-to-least charitable, any of:
1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire.
2. Github could offer, or the user could request, a pro-rated refund along with cancellation of the account.
3. Tough luck, those users agreed that Github could unilaterally change the ToS at any time.
Right now there is a cancel and refund button on the Github Copilot annual subscription setting, which I have just pressed.
> 1. Github could choose to grandfather in those plans and make no changes until those plans expire.
They explicitly stated that they won't be doing that: the multipliers go into effect in June for everyone, annual plan or not.
I doubt you can force them to provide the service with the original terms, but you might be able to ask for a (partial) refund. If not today, after a week of verbal abuse they will receive for this online.
It depends where you’re located. In the EU they have to honor the contract you entered, but presumably there is a clause that they can prematurely terminate the contract without cause and give you all of your money back (from the start of the contract).
My thought exactly! First the usage limits + model limitations and now fundamental change to the billing. Hope some consumer watchdogs are looking into this!
I just checked and you can cancel with a refund.
For the yearly plan they only change the model multiplier. And it's in the subscription contract they can change that multiplier at any time.
Does this mean you can only prompt "Hello" every morning for a month with Opus 4.7 ?
So I guess from now on GH Copilot is only worth it if you want a quality autocomplete in VSCode.
That was the first thing I turned off in VSCode. Autocomplete for my TypeScript projects was great. And the "AI" suggestions/completions were really getting in the way of me still being the "driver."
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.
We all knew this from the very beginning but couldn't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on their subscription-based pricing strategy. It was nuts except for those few corporations burning investor money to keep competition out as long as possible. Now they don't have to hide anymore that subscription pricing won't do it for ai. The pyramid scheme is falling.
So what's the best alternative now? Openrouter + cline or something else?
i like opencode's zen https://opencode.ai/en/zen with opencode's TUI.
haven't touched copilot for one year, this reminds me to cancel, it will take sometime to catch up
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?
I keep hearing that Codex is the best bang for your buck now.
Why would anyone stay on the Pro+ plan going forward? Pro with openrouter for Opus would be cheaper?
So we left the times when we struggled to estimate the return of investment on all the predicted LLM tokrns usage to the times when we even don't know for sure how much tokens for the same amount of money?
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.
Soon it will be cheaper to just do it yourself
Here goes my Copilot Pro subscription then, reluctantly heading over to Codex CLI since the CC base plan is downright unusable.
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.
It made more sense in the ye old days where a request was basically just a chat message in a sidebar and it could also edit code. Then saying someone can use 300 chat messages a month kinda makes sense.
Turns out when a request can spawn tens of subagents and use millions of tokens over many turns of toolcalls then suddenly github copilot has a massive financial problem on their hands.
This approach started with the “Ask a question about your code” feature, which is more comparable to single chat message with relatively predictable token usage. Now it’s an agent who might work for 30 minutes, read the whole codebase, and write 1000 lines
I'm not usually a Conspiracy Guy, and the answer is probably `incompetence * tech_debt`. But I think that having sufficient layers of abstraction to any billing model is a useful way to hide the real cost of things. It's why it's done everywhere.
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.
"The bottom line" is the new "Its not just X, its Y"
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.
> rather low compared to what you could use same plan until now.
That's exactly where the subsidy is being removed.
End of an era for predictable costs as a small business. We will refer to these times as ‘the good old days’.
I expect the prices to rise to almost cover the cost savings from layoffs at large companies.
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.
Already there are companies paying more for coding tokens than for programmer salaries.
That's my point. They made those decisions without any consideration for the long run, which would have required them to project the cost of AI services years into the future. Obviously management didn't do that and had no way to do that. It made current earnings look good, though, which was enough for them when they made the decision.
Not sure what your point is, but they are firing lower performing programmers so that the top programmers have more tokens to spend.
Doesn't necessarily mean that's a good idea.
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.
DeepSeek will do the same thing.
Z/Mimo already raised their prices multiple times since the promotional prices at the start of the year.
DeepSeek is actually more expensive than expected ATM due to compute shortage, but they said it would come down in price.
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
aaaand another github outage today. FFS
... 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
What "goodwill"? It's just more "AI credits" for what will be a shit product in June.
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.
Yeah, local is clearly the future. Even beyond the cheap Chinese models you can install the apfel[1] stuff if you're on a mac and want a quick available onboard cli option. And I'm sure people will adapt the Flash-MoE[2] integration to be even better soon as well.
[1] https://apfel.franzai.com/ [2] https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe
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.
Re 1: Current models don't solve coding. They are useful tool for it though.
Re 2: Open weight models seem to be less than a year behind proprietary ones, so sure, if you're willing to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a super computer that you probably don't fully utilize instead of renting time on someone else's super computer for a lot less.
So about a month left before cancelling. Got it.
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?
It's less surprise, but more confusing given the game theory as their competitors are not doing the same thing and the multiplier changes alone will likely churn current users.
TLDR: It's a 6-9x price increase
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