HN

Need help?
<- Back
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

frizlab

Comments (372)

  • theanonymousone
    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...
  • my002
    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.
  • Ilaurens
    "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?
  • 999900000999
    Well.Just got an email from GitHub saying they'll be raising prices for Co Pilot."To keep up with the way you use Copilot, we're transitioning to usage-based billing, and we want to give you enough time to prepare."Man, it was fun. Having my tokens subsidized by Microsoft. If the prices go up to much I guess I'll try Deepseek again.
  • hakunin
    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.
  • 4ndrewl
    "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!"
  • sefrost
    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
  • simonw
    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.
  • born_a_skeptic
    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.
  • nickjj
    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.
  • postalcoder
    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.
  • giancarlostoro
    They're not the only ones in the AI sphere to wind back, but they're the weirdest case in my eyes. Microsoft invests in having engineers building open models and they don't use a single one. I really don't get it.But what really surprised me most about Copilot is that it would bill you per question, nothing about tokens. So if I managed to produce a prompt that gave me back an insane amount of tokens for something, which using any Claude model would easily accomplish, you were giving me my money's worth, at your own expense. The math is not gonna math out forever.
  • _pdp_
    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.
  • notsylver
    I pay for github copilot solely for completions and use codex for actual agent work. I really wish I could pay like $5/month for just completions or there was a good local alternative for them.
  • 0xffff2
    So given that I primarily interact with LLM's through VSCode, and I prefer the Copilot interface to the Claude Code plugin, does anyone have any suggestions on other plugins I should try? In my experience, Copilot is much more "plugged in" than any of the other plugins, in the sense that it can see things like linter outputs in VSCode. Basically, copilot "sees what I see" in a way that no other plugin or command line tool can, which make it much more ergonomic to use.With this pricing change, I see no reason at all to stick with Copilot in principle, but I really need to solve this issue of IDE integration to move on.
  • deweller
    Has anyone found the answer to this yet?> What is the benefit of using the Copilot Pro+ at 39$/month instead of using the Copilot Pro at 10$/month and paying for extra usage?
  • gyoridavid
    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)
  • kanemcgrath
    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.
  • jareds
    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?
  • conqrr
    just cancelled mine. Only reason to have it was I could get a lot more done with a single prompt. No reason why I shouldn't go to the model provider directly instead.
  • CraigJPerry
    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.
  • netule
    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.
  • everfrustrated
    Current multipliers vs from June Opus 4.6 3x -> 27x Opus 4.7 3x -> 27x GPT 5.4 1x -> 6x EDIT: only applies to annual plans
  • edzitron
  • stabbles
    I was surprised to find that this sentence> Plan prices aren’t changingdid 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.
  • heikkilevanto
    I started to use github copilot with vscode, but have never been too happy about the system. Over the months I gravitated to much more agentic workstyle, hardly ever editing much code by hand. The vscode IDE was getting more in the way. I had already started to look at OpenCode, and when I found it has a web interface, I was happy to switch over. I use a simple editor (KDE's Kate), or just less to skim through the code and/or a git diff. OpenCode has some free models in it, but I think I will need to get some kind of subscription for a better one. But it won't be copilot any more. The market is moving so fast that I don't know what are the most resonable models, or the most flexible way to set them up so I can switch when prices change yet again.
  • grey-area
    How is this legal when people paid for a yearly plan in advance?
  • geomcentral
    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.
  • mrinterweb
    I only use copilot for the occasional auto-complete suggestion. I'm betting I could run a lightweight local LLM with llama.cpp to get similar functionality. Maybe this would be a decent replacement https://github.com/TabbyML/tabby
  • mitjam
    I was always curious how they can sustain a request based pricing model when requests can range from tiny to huge with all the modalities GH Copilot offers. Was a steal for agentic coding that turned out to be too good to be true, in the end. Still: Thank you for the ride.
  • zihotki
    Looks like Microsoft has run out of compute and can't scale it fast enough to serve copilot users and Azure AI Foundry needs, given that the customer base is growing there as well.
  • alecsm
    So I guess from now on GH Copilot is only worth it if you want a quality autocomplete in VSCode.
  • hrpnk
    What's the residual value of Copilot after the changes? For Enterprise plans, even copilot code reviews will be charged at token price + github action minutes for the execution of the review. One can roll one's own reviewer and have it spend the API tokens as well. At least one will be able to select the subset of files for the change set, if needed.The background agents will also depreciate in value because of their harness that's a black box that's not optimized for token usage at all. Rolling one's own will be a better choice here.
  • Jayakumark
    Does this mean you can only prompt "Hello" every morning for a month with Opus 4.7 ?
  • stego-tech
    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.
  • zitterbewegung
    I guess this is the "Google App engine" of Vibe coding when google raised pricing of App Engine significantly after being in preview. Doing weird price changes like this when coming out for new services make much more sense than doing this change which will just anger users.
  • deaux
    "Paid for annual? Tough luck, from now on your usage limits are reduced by 89%. You can do 11% of what you paid for. Good luck if you paid annual a month ago!"And then they have the gall to say> "The bottom line: Plan prices aren’t changing"If anyone lives in a place like Germany or Australia and has an annual sub, please take them to court, you're guaranteed to win because you have reasonable consumer protections and their ToS doesn't stand a chance. 9x reduction is unreasonable and the consumer cannot be expected to see this coming.In case some diehard enshittifier believes that consumers should know better and businesses should be allowed to get away with it, where is the line? 99% reduction? Is that still okay?If this situation is to be acceptable then it should be regulated as a financial product like stocks, which come with knowledge tests of "do you know you can lose all of your money?". And come with regulatory compliance and all that.
  • textech
    I'd be fine with it if they can make Sonnet 4.5 unlimited. I haven't personally seen any major differences between 4.6 or any of the other newer models. Claude 4.5 seems to be the right balance and works great for me.
  • anon
    undefined
  • rob
    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.
  • notatoad
    so what's everybody using to get autocompletions in vscode? i've been using copilot just because $10 is cheap, but i use opencode for everything other than completions.i tried the continue vscode extension, and it seemed kind of janky. are there better options?
  • redsaber
    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.
  • Abby_101
    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.
  • CrzyLngPwd
    In light of this, does anyone have a DGX Spark and use it as a coding agent?
  • sreekanth850
    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.
  • metahost
    Here goes my Copilot Pro subscription then, reluctantly heading over to Codex CLI since the CC base plan is downright unusable.
  • tomaskafka
    Well, the free launch for somebody else's money is over.
  • swader999
    This reminds me, I have to cancel co-pilot...
  • semiquaver
    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.
  • anon
    undefined
  • Ronsenshi
    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.
  • wvenable
    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?
  • upcoming-sesame
    what's the best place to transition to on a company level after this change ? should companies just switch to pay as you go with open router ?
  • bachmeier
    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.
  • Aeroi
    from these comments I'm going to make mouse.dev pricing as follows-BYOK runs are $0 to Mouse, period.-Hosted runs are billed at provider cost + a published markup.-We will never invent a unit of billing that isn't denominated in tokens, seconds, or tool calls.-Credits in the paid category never expire.
  • midtake
    Soon it will be cheaper to just do it yourself
  • anon
    undefined
  • Flundstrom2
    It was just a matter of time, considering how many Mtok you could consume in just 300 prompts.
  • everfrustrated
    Why would anyone stay on the Pro+ plan going forward? Pro with openrouter for Opus would be cheaper?
  • whatsthatabout
    So what's the best alternative now? Openrouter + cline or something else?
  • twistedcheeslet
    End of an era for predictable costs as a small business. We will refer to these times as ‘the good old days’.
  • herrj
    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
  • synergy20
    haven't touched copilot for one year, this reminds me to cancel, it will take sometime to catch up
  • talideon
    And so it begins...
  • fortran77
    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.
  • miroljub
    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.
  • ReptileMan
    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.
  • speedgoose
    So about a month left before cancelling. Got it.
  • insane_dreamer
    Glad this was announced because I didn't even realize that our (small) team has been paying $20/month for Github Copilot when none of us are using it, so used the opportunity to cancel CoPilot altogether. I think it was free when I first activated it (this was also before Claude, Codex, Gemini, and while not that great, it was why not), and didn't realize it had switched to paid and bundled with our Github bill, and now per usage.
  • to11mtm
    ... 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
  • dude250711
    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.
  • anon
    undefined
  • hkon
    Github Copilot has for the last week been an absolute shitshow. Clearly something has happened behind the scenes.AI itself clearly weaker / dumber. Prices increased manyfold.
  • exidex
    "The bottom line" is the new "Its not just X, its Y"
  • thinkingtoilet
    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?
  • fridder
    aaaand another github outage today. FFS
  • ihsw
    [dead]
  • silverwind
    TLDR: It's a 6-9x price increase
  • immanuwell
    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
  • WhereIsTheTruth
    Still no chips coming from MicroslopGoogle won