GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
6 months ago by KyuubiNoKitsune to c/technology
I love how corpos can just change the rules at will.
Edit: New prices:
And if you look at the old pricing structure, some of the models are increasing by 27x
Which brings the model back to AI. All businesses have accomplished was basically add an extra step in actually forcing themselves to pay for what they actually need every so often. Instead of Sr>jr>offshore>sr. they now just added in AI to the loop.
Not that charlatans care, as long as they get theirs in the interim.
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).
holy shit, 9x the previous cost. which was already not great. I was on the fence about cancelling it, but thanks for making up my mind, MS
Which is a crime, by the way, when you sell it together with a product you hold a monopoly for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
Yeah, but on the other hand look at the ballroom they've donated to (for completely non-corrupt reasons).
I love that their email made it sound like it was a wash, like "we're just changing our billing model, you'll get credits now, samesies!" but then this pricing chart buried 3-levels down from the announcement lays out just how much less you're going to get for the same price.
I wonder about all the startups who were bragging about their $10k/month AI coding bills being the best money they ever spent. When this new pricing kicks in and pushes it to $40k/month right around the time all the vibe-coded shit blows up their codebase, I wonder if they'll still be so happy with their choices.
I interviewed for a place a while back and started asking about quality and velocity and how they balance it with AI developer tools, he said something like "One of our developers closed 400 PRs last month" and I instantly knew it was definitely not the place for me.
I wonder about all the startups who were bragging about their $10k/month AI coding bills being the best money they ever spent.
WTF did they think was going to happen?
So, did they use AI tools to type "LGTM" 400 times or nah?
But yeah, I also find that frustrating. Management just looks at terrible metrics like PRs closed or lines of code produced.
It's not even novel that you can produce terrible code very quickly. Decades ago, our industry learned that it isn't worth it, because you suffer for it later. Now the game is altered slightly and management demands that we throw all these learnings out the window.
They should really describe this as you’re on the same plan, but your plan gives you 80-88% less use.
These tech companies are a bunch of criminals. I fucking hate this industry.
You're looking at Claude, I don't See Copilot
Edit: ignore me, I finally reviewed the article and is through GH, not actual MS 365 page.
copilot isnt a model. its a front end that lets you pick a model. that table shows usage costs.
Tale as old as time. Corpos try to get you dependent and then give your business an atomic wedgie.
I really hope you're right. My employer is using it as a crutch. I don't think they can stop using AI because they just don't have enough skilled employees to deliver on their commitments. They would pay nearly any price, and I'm sure they're not alone.
They would pay nearly any price
Literally any price except paying skilled employees.
They would have to stop wasting so much money on LLM's first.
watch me go back to debugging like a real engineer: copying and pasting from stack overflow
at this rate, it will be
Gonna be hilarious when the people who haven't been paying attention realize that they just replaced workers with shit that doesn't work AND actually costs more.
Yep, I've been telling anyone who'll listen that if you really want to drop juniors and give tools to seniors, then you have to pay the monthly cost (whatever it will be) and you have to be ready to foot the big bill in 5 years when your seniors (with no candidate replacements) say they'll take a 50% raise or walk.
This is the right way to go. This will incentivize many companies to rethink their strategy, and slow down or scale down AI adoption. After that and the revenue drops for many AI companies, they will back off purchasing all possible RAM and storage in existence which will drive down pricing. And when the prices get to normal again, we will simply buy more RAM for our local machines and run free models.
This news kinda makes me happy. Shit's starting to fall apart. Finally.
So, if you subscribe to the $10/ month plan you get $10 worth of tokens to use within a month, and if you subscribe to the $49/month plan you get $49 worth of tokens to use within a month.
At this point why subscribe? Just pay directly the tokens so if you use less you pay less.
To me it doesn't make sense to subscribe at $49 and maybe use $30 of tokens.
People were subscribing at the $49 plan because they were using $1000 in tokens worth
People were subscribing at the $49 plan because they were using $1000 in tokens worth
Companies were just eating that $951/mo loss so they could gain market share by burning their nearly endless pile of capital.
Now were on the cusp of the bubble bursting so the dominant players are now trying to extract revenue via rapid enshittification.
It's not price fixing, that would be illegal, it just so happens that they're all changing their business model at the same time. If they were doing illegal things there would be an investigation.
In completely unrelated news, didn't you see the nice ballroom plans?
👉 💥 💥 GET DOWN DID SOMEONE SAY BALLROOM
Just as open weight models are getting good. Qwen 3.6 27B just dropped with claimed performance approaching Opus 4.6, but it can run on a Mac with a M-series SoC. I tested it out today on a M4 Pro with Ollama and Cline and was impressed with its reasoning, but it was slow. Going to try with llama.cpp tomorrow and mess around tweaking it for speed.
AI coding agents are useful, but it’s time for the cloud-based models to chill out so we can get cheap RAM again to run our shit locally.
Think of it like a happy little coincidence
https://www.reddit.com/r/GithubCopilot/ right now is entertaining
The tears are delicious
How else are they going to begin to recap their billions and billions of debt? Someone has to pay for all those data centres, all that hardware, all that power, etc etc etc. It will be the companies that have come to rely on AI.
Sure, for now, AI is a lot cheaper than an intern, but it doesn't become an expert like a human does. And Amazon used to be cheaper than other retailers right up until they had achieved vast market share.
This cannot be the last 10x price multiplier they pull. Not even close. Firstly they're way, way, way off from recouping their costs, and secondly, they're still way, way off market value for an incompetent human intern who isn't learning much.
Uber didn't enter the market to open up taxis to new drivers and bring down prices, that was marketing. They entered the market to take a cut out of ever taxi fare in the world, and drive up prices at peak times to many times the agreed fares, especially in regulated areas.
Similarly, AI didn't enter the coding market to drive down prices and enable greater access for folk to generate code. They entered the coding market to receive the wages of programmers and drive up prices in in-demand fields. They are not unaware of how much companies pay devs. Why else would they have spent all those billions in advance? Where is the payback coming from?
Getting de-skilled is starting to look like a very expensive gamble and this is just the first price hike, expect more to come. And expect them to criminalize open source models as well with some national security concerns or something.
Inline completions are genuinely useful, I’m mostly replacing them with local models though. They are slower but free as in beer (once you pay the hardware cost).
I'm interested in setting it up, are you using vs code? Which extension or editor?
I’m using vim with minuet-ai, and it plugs the AI suggestion into my completion module. I found the Copilot style virtual text interfaces all janky.
I tried AI auto-complete for maybe 6 months. I found that mistakes and hard to find bugs increased, actually lowering my productivity. I find that actually just typing everything (well, with traditional LSP) gives me more time to think about my code, the architecture, etc while I'm typing, leading to better results. "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast."
Sure, but hopefully small code completion (2-4b range) models can run locally on a lot of things. They’re just less good.
You could also just not use these services. You don't need them. They were a stupid idea to begin with.
You could also just not use these services.
I do need RAM, though.
Fortunately, I got pretty well stocked up before this shit, but the hardware I've got now will fail eventually.
Of course it is... Funny though, bc nobody really uses it at work, so our pricing should theoretically go down... But I doubt it, MS will find a way to make it go up
they are probably going to reskin copilot, or not even name it so people wont notice it.
I could be really cruel right now, I could point out to people how this is chickens coming home to roost, how it's always been grossly subsidized and underpriced, how the game was always getting users, companies, the country, the whole damn world hooked on these slop machines and then once they're reliant on them to jack up the price hugely. I could be really mean about this, I could lord it over people, I could point out how they've been dupes this whole time and in the process traitors to all of humanity.
I could. i think I will.
People like you act like local models don’t exist. Anyone relying purely on a single cloud hosted model for their work is an idiot.
Anyone relying on AI to do their work is an idiot.
I have an acquaintance (not sure if qualifies as a friend) who made news for getting fired for, when they were ill, asking an AI to get a quote out of an article for them, which it just out-and-out made up and got them fired. They aren't stupid, but maybe a bit too trusting. The world lambasted them, which is a huge shame because they do really good work. One strike, you're out.
So I am not unsympathetic to people who get, in essence, betrayed by AI. (not literally so, because AI is not a person) But yes I think people should be very careful, more careful they they're being now certainly.
They also should be ready for if it all falls apart, as training costs increase and becomes harder. Already websites like IMDB are putting CAPTCHAs on their site just to browse it. It used to be an accommodating site to scripts that used it to gather information automatically, but those days seem to be over now. Expect to see that more and more, and in the process, the web becomes that much more annoying to use for plain old human readers too.
Related: Microsoft and OpenAI announced end of exclusivity agreement today
Interesting.
That was intentional. They were trying to word the announcement to not make it sound like you're now getting 1/5-1/9 as much AI for the same price.
Yeah, I imagine that they did try. But it's not just the intentionally misleading announcement post, they also have 5(?) different subscription tiers, which get different changes from this. And one of the subscription tiers is actually called "Pro+", so that does not mean "Pro and more expensive tiers" like I wondered. And they have this ridiculous intermediate currency to make things even more confusing.
Their offering itself is overly complex and confusing...
The whole “AI Credit” thing did strike me as odd to even introduce. They mention a few times that 1 AI Credit = $0.01, but then do the whole pricing table in $/1M tokens.
The only place I saw them even use “AI Credits” as a unit was to say the $10/month plan includes 1000 AI Credits. Why even introduce a whole new unit if you only use it to say your $10 monthly plan includes $10 of usage?
I suspect the answer is so that they can later muddy the waters by changing the number of included credits to be less than you’re paying monthly without directly saying “you’re now paying $20/month for $10 of usage”
I guess it is coming from the same people who came up with the world’s most inscrutable billing scheme for compute…
I mean, even then, they could increase the price per token, if they want to hand out fewer tokens for the price paid.
They could make this work like a prepaid SIM card, where you charge it with e.g. $10 and then you can use it until the $10 are used up.
Instead, they make it work like in-game currencies in scammy free-to-play games. Except that they didn't choose a confusing conversion rate, for some reason...
Wtf is this?
The most foreseeable event of the last 20 years.
Massive out of this world investment + no demand = prices so cheap they were operating at a huge loss
Operating at a huge loss + time = huge enshittification
Raising prices is the easiest form of enshittification. Ads are coming too. Lastly it will be degrading features. Incorporating more features that no one wants, and bundling with other services that no one wants.
Incredibly predictable. I told my manager this is exactly what would happen. They'd hook us into AI and then jack up prices after we adapted the business for it. He actually thought pricing would go down as the tech "gets more efficient". Lmao.
The cult mentality over AI in tech is crazy to see. I feel like I don't even know half my co-workers anymore, some of these people actually use pronouns to refer to a fucking chat bot. It's unreal. I feel like it's not even worth the money anymore, there was always BS in this industry, but this is getting ridiculous. I need to GTFO.
And nothing of value was lost.
We're not solidly into the enshitification stage of the AI bubble. But unlike most things, it's never created value and only drains revenue.
I literally just signed up for the $10/month plan... Guess ill just run my own git server.
Git? Forgejo is really nice.
Im just familiar with git.
Check it out, it's pretty sweet
Basically selfhostable github.
Gotcha, ill give it a go. Thanks
Moving local to not support githib, I run Open Claw local too
I assume those costs are closer to the real cost to provide the service, ouch!
Not even close. Most AI companies are making something like 95% loss according to an article here a bit ago. So if you're an AI provider, you need to multiply prices by 25 before you even begin to eat into your insane levels of debt.
On the potentially bright side maybe this will make people think harder about which model to use for which task. You don't need to feed your entire code base into Opus when a Gemini Flash sub-agent can do a perfectly fine job running grep and compiling a summary for the main agent.
what does github copilot do? ELI20ish
Mostly hallucinate and tell you you’re absolutely right
"AI Credit"
fuck !!!
You should just cancel. Seriously.
Your brain.
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I mean, if AI gets too expensive, companies can always hire juniors to replace them 🤣
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