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theanonymousone
everfrustrated
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.
asdfasgasdgasdg
> 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.
rurp
Enterprise sales will be the answer. Microsoft will have some story that convinces an exec eight levels up the org chart from the normal users that this is an essential product they need to overpay for. Given their existing relationshipsand immense sales team they'll probably have success.
munk-a
They list the price 900% higher and give a 90% discount to enterprises who also use teams, outlook, office or even windows if they're desperate. Then that becomes a deal so good that enterprises can't afford not to take it!
theanonymousone
I'm already on Pro. Why should I keep it?
rs38
e.g. if on an annual plan? 0x will be gone, but there are okay 1x and 0.3x models left. I am pretty much curious how the early may test invoicing will look like. current setup of tools etc. is way too chatty eats up 1+M token per PRU easily. not sure how much is cached.
saratogacx
Only reason to keep it is if you like their UX and auto-complete. Everything else is on pay per use and if you don't use all of it (good luck with the 5 hour and week caps) you have just paid more for the auto-complete
The deal is really pretty much garbage now and I believe that is the intent.
hununu
private repos
quietsegfault
OpenRouter charges a 5% (?) fee for buying credits.
XCSme
Yeah, but you get the benefit of using any model of your choice.
dannyw
A very reasonable and fair markup that is clear and well articulated and not changing (at least so far) on a whim.
mdesq
I have to wonder if it's because of how many Enterprise customers they have who have standardized on Github Copilot and gotten it through the gauntlet of legal approvals etc.
pverheggen
This rings true to me as someone who's worked at a few large corps like this. A price hike does not change things when there is a mandate to use MS products over other vendors.
codebje
That is exactly where I am.
We're putting other providers through the gauntlet. An M4 Studio or two running the latest Qwen3 or whatever counts for state of the art in open models is also looking a little more viable all the time.
dannyw
They can be super complementary! Open weight models can be your everyday standard goto, and frontier models for the harder and bigger tasks.
Having some open weight deployment or vendor is also a good thing, because you may have domain specific tasks where you can get better results on domain specific problems with a quick finetune.
Unsloth makes it particularly easy. Open weight LLMs are incredibly powerful building blocks.
on_the_train
Bingo. Ghcp is the only allowed llm solution at our big well known semiconductor corp. It'll take years to get approval for anything else. We're stuck with it and will pay whatever price we have to.
gpm
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.
redsaber
they're downsizing free github copilot pro for open source maintainers. At the very least, it looks like small open source projects got their free copilot pro cut off
rmast
I was kinda of disappointed when that happened earlier this month, but not as much now after seeing this change. My primary use had been trying out some of the newer Anthropic and OpenAI models, which probably would have burned through $10 worth of credits rather quickly given their new pricing.
fooey
for my experience currently, I greatly prefer the VSCode Copilot extension experience over the Claude Extension
I think VSCode only supports copilot for "autocomplete" too
on top of that, you need GitHub Copilot for the PR reviewer functionality in GitHub
cityofdelusion
Huh, I find my copilot plugin to be so incredibly glitchy. My agents are always reporting that their shells are mangled that commands are truncated and all kinds of nonsense. Sometimes they spin up dev servers fine other times it just hangs waiting for a terminal response. So far I have found relying on the CLI from the model providers to be significantly more reliable.
I do like the integrations with the IDE however, they are convenient for rapidly reviewing changes. I just need their terminals to actually work!
evilsnoopi3
I had this problem and it turns out it was my oh-my-posh command prompt customization. VS Code injects certain control characters into the output stream for agents to observe events and the theming runs after those mechanics are hooked up so it can interfere. Updating to the latest oh-my-posh fixed it for me.
Here's the oh-my-posh GH issue[0] in case your problem is similar but not solvable with a simple package update.
[0]: https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh/issues/7029
theanonymousone
You can use Copilot extension with OpenRouter (among others).
And yes, I need to find a solution for autocomplete. It used to be available in free tier of Copilot. Not sure anymore.
ezfe
Enterprise gets pooled credits and will like having everything go through one place so I think it still works.
mnahkies
You can pool credits through open router (afaik, I'm only using a single user account), but if you top-up $10 per user, per month, any unused credits will rollover.
Tbh I think it still works, but only because the new allowance will likely get used very quickly within a billing cycle - I'm expecting this change to increase our orgs bill significantly based on how many API credits with open router I consume in a weekend using a single agent in a pairing style.
The pooling will only be useful if you have a bunch of infrequent/low usage users that you still want to have licenses.
MartinodF
Which is almost guaranteed to be the case for a large org, considering everyone will want auto complete and PR reviews, but on average most will not be making a ton of agent use
seventuning
[flagged]
XCSme
I am a bit confused by the separation between VSCode and Copilot. If I cancel my Pro+ subscription, can I still use Copilot with my own OpenRouter key?
albert_e
is $10 Pro monthly subscription a pre-requisite before i can purchase $10 in API credits?
PS: i would have loved if I can directly buy $10 in credits and be free to spend it as quickly or as leisurly as I want -- without any monthly expiry or fixed recurring payments
J_Shelby_J
Is there a way to use the autocomplete feature with an api?
ezfe
No but autocomplete is not part of this billing change
krzyk
Is that autocomplete better than IntelliJ own plus their local only LLM completion?
I uninstalled copilot plugin because it was eating memory and its completions where about 60% good and the rest was bad.
After switching back to IntelliJ I see just positives.
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.
giwook
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.
dualvariable
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...]
geodel
> 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.
croes
I guess the new models will still be quantum leaps, but literally: "The smallest possible change in a system"
giwook
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.
Fire-Dragon-DoL
I hope it's true, but right now hardware prices are insane
hirako2000
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.
Gigachad
This is the best AI programming will be. From here on the enshitification starts and the prices go up.
ctoth
It has been years now of reading this same comment... Surely people can't keep typing it forever.
stefan_
Dunno, if in this day and age you are making inference more expensive, more scarce, you are honestly moving in the wrong direction and DeepSeek and others will gladly take your lunch.
Gigachad
The hardware to run deepseek is still incredibly expensive.
sergiotapia
That is folly because there is very minimal cost to switching providers, let alone models.
glicvdfhsdf
[dead]
bluescrn
Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?
If/when it gets to the point where it can replace a skilled worker, the service can be sold for close to 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 to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best.
hansmayer
> Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?
Yes, a lot of people (not me). Why? Well because that was the whole value proposition of these companies, relentlessly pushed by their PR and most of the media- rememmber it was something something Pocket PhDs, massive unemployment etc?
rwyinuse
"There's not going to be much competition to drive prices down, the barriers to entry are already huge. There'll likely to be one clear winner, becoming a near-monopoly, or maybe we'll get a duopoly at best."
Based on what exactly? So far every time OpenAI, Anthropic or whatever has released a new top performing model, competitors have caught up quickly. Open source models have greatly improved as well.
I expect AI to be just like cloud computing in general - AWS, Azure, GCP being the main providers, with dozens of smaller competitors offering similar services as well.
flir
I do. "Commoditize your complement". Want to sell lots of silicon? Give away good local models to run on that silicon.
Even if SOTA models in the cloud are a few percentage points better, most work can be routed to local models most of the time. That leaves the cloud providers fighting over the most computationally intensive tasks. In the long term, I think models are going to be local-first.
(Unless providers can figure out a network effect that local models can't replicate).
soraisdead
> Did anyone really expect AI to be cheap?
Considering most of the cost of producing a model is the upfront cost rather than the running one, I kinda still do.
The point was never to produce 4 frontier models per company a year.
skeeter2020
"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.
torben-friis
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.
fsniper
And enshitification starts.
specproc
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.
cedws
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.
ffsm8
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
attentive
Or you could use gcp Vertex or aws Bedrock and still have access to a bunch of FMs without a markup.
AntiUSAbah
Wow thats a lot for routing traffic.
webworker
I will not be renewing/switching over, either.
I had copilot mainly so I could write issues and throw agents at it, while I went off and did other things. Has been great for contained spot work.
At this point, I'll go ahead and leave it expire, and then consolidate between Codex and JetBrains AI. Especially since Xcode supports Codex with a first-party integration.
seventuning
[flagged]
nacs
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.
krzyk
They do for any new plan. Those multipliers are only for people that paid annually. After their subscription ends they'll go into token based pricing like the rest of people.
mitjam
I understand it like : the 10 usd is for handling the business record, maybe also the harness, I get a few coins to kick tires, but to use it for anything real it’s pay as you go by the tokens list price.
altmanaltman
> 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
tjoff
... that is exactly what they will do. Just click the link in this thread, or read the headline.
ItsClo688
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.
thrdbndndn
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?
rvnx
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)
schneehertz
Even when using OpenRouter in Hong Kong, it is still not possible to connect to region-restricted models like Gemini
johndough
It's interesting that the cost multiplier for Claude Sonnet 4/4.5/4.6 varies so much (1/6/9), while the API cost is exactly the same for all three models.
Also, the multiplier of 27 for Claude Opus 4.6/4. is way higher than the increase in API price would suggest.
I wonder why that is.
vanviegen
On GitHub copilot you pay per prompt. More powerful models can do a lot more work (consuming a lot more tokens) per prompt. Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.
johndough
> More powerful models can do a lot more work (consuming a lot more tokens) per prompt.
That is not my experience. Each model since at least GPT-4 can fill up an entire context window. In fact, more powerful models can solve tasks faster, so their ratio of multiplier to API price should decrease, not increase.
For example, Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a multiplier of 9 and an API price of $15, which is 0.6 multiplier per dollar.
Claude Opus 4.7 has an API price of $25, so it should have a multiplier of 25 * 0.6 = 15 when extrapolating from Sonnet, but the multiplier is 27.
> Also, they tend to use more thinking tokens.
That might be it. Is there any data on this somewhere?
mullingitover
The point of this loss leading is to properly hoover up the money in the pockets of enterprise customers, get them locked into the idea that they need the latest and greatest cloud-based model, while simultaneously starving everyone of the memory they'd need in order to run competent models locally.
In not-too-distant future we're going to be running better models on our phones than we can buy access to today in the cloud. Skate where the puck is going: soak the customers until that day comes.
port11
I think your first paragraph is spot on, while the second is fairly incorrect. Hardware isn’t getting cheaper at a reasonable pace, and datacenters will keep depleting the market. State-of-the-art models are very, very far from being run on your own hardware.
mullingitover
> State-of-the-art models are very, very far from being run on your own hardware.
Still, the models will only get smarter and more efficient as the hardware gets cheaper. The timeframe may be debatable but the outcome really isn't.
rvnx
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
minimaxir
It takes longer to build a datacenter with that much capacity than it does for the market to respond.
2ndorderthought
Buying real estate in imaginary places is lucrative at first
AntiUSAbah
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?
hgoel
I think they're going to have to do a lot to overcome the Musk and Grok poison. Even ChatGPT hasn't had as many lapses as Grok has had.
undefined
gigiogigione
I don’t get the SpaceX reference. I thought they made rockets?
victorbjorklund
Nobody is paying for Elons xAI so he used SpaceX to buy xAI to fund it.
vizzier
They now also own xAI
undefined
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?
Someone1234
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.
to11mtm
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.
Someone1234
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?
Mattwmaster58
For orgs, each user was allotted their own quota. For messages beyond that quota, a pooled budget is available.
DominikPeters
They mention in the announcement that it will be possible to pool usage across an organization.
freedomben
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.
stetrain
They could add rollover balances and be back to cell phone plans in the early 2000s.
kalleboo
Only if we also get unlimited nights & weekends.
joegibbs
$39 of credits at API costs is useless too, what are you going to do there, a single hour of coding? One half of a feature per month?
polski-g
That's enough for 4 days of programming if you use GLM5.
cush
Are you thinking something like rollover plans?
seventuning
[flagged]
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.
cedws
Seems like a strong signal the money burning party is coming to a close. Nearly all AI companies have tightened their belts in the past month. Anthropic removed Claude Code from the Pro plan, Z.AI increased their prices, GitHub removed some Claude models from Copilot, now this.
Also, Opus 4.7 seems like a model more intended to save Anthropic money than push the bar.
pythonaut_16
> Seems like a strong signal the money burning party is coming to a close.
One provider who was undercutting the market with non-standard billing model moving to a more standard billing and prices doesn't seem like that strong of a signal, other than that Copilot was underpriced.
I don't disagree with your other points though.
ThunderSizzle
It was the only clear model from a user's perspective. Sure, a request may not perform as expected, or end earlier than desired, but it was an agreed to cost that was clear on both sides: 1 enter press in a prompt window = 1 request.
If they wanted to limit what a request can do via their harness, I'm sure they artificially could.
I hate all of the other plans I've seen of here a "credit" or here's a "bucket of usage", and we pull an announced amount from it based on arbitrary info that can't be audited or proven, and most of shat is spent might be entirely useless anyway.
Claude Code has a problem where 1 request could take a significant portion of your 5 hour window, and it's unclear why.
It's much like SEO, where Google sometimes says things that might help, but it's just magic wand eaving hoping something works.
linhns
I believe Anthropic added CC back to the pro plan.
jLaForest
the point is that they tipped their hand about where they want to go in the future. They are just A B testing to see how much it pissed off their customers
Computer0
Now they just removed Opus.
0xffff2
>Opus 4.7 seems like a model more intended to save Anthropic money than push the bar.
How so? By all accounts I've read so far it uses more tokens overall for roughly the same results.
kdheiwns
If you're delivering the same results and charging the customer more/letting the customer use the product less, that's saving the company money.
captainbland
Yeah, honestly it feels like this came faster than I was expecting. I thought we'd see another few years of reeling in with too-good-to-be-true prices to really lock in dependency but it feels like most companies have kind of a lot of wiggle room to back out of this still
darqis
Anthropic has done no such thing. WTF is wrong with you people? HN used to be made up of industry people, but random uninformed comments
0xffff2
Link to the announcement for anyone else like me who hasn't gotten the email yet: https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilo...
Not really sure why I would stick with Copilot after this, and increasing Sonnet from 1x to 9x for annual subscribers is highway fucking robbery. Very glad I didn't commit myself to an annual plan.
999900000999
> Alternatively, they may convert to a monthly paid plan before their annual plan expires, and we will provide prorated credits for the remaining value of their annual plan.
I don’t understand if this means they’re providing actual refunds or not. For them to straight up go back on their word this had to have been a major cost they didn’t exactly expect.
Save us Deepseek!
I don’t need the world’s greatest programmer for the types of vibe coding projects I actually build.
However, if compute keeps going up in cost, hiring skilled people who know how to utilize it becomes more important. This might save the tech economy.
malfist
What does that mean? That copilot users can use 1/9th of their prior usage of Sonnet?
0xffff2
Contrary to the other reply, I'm going to say yes, that's exactly what it means. For Github Copilot users with annual plans that are grandfathered in to per-prompt rather than per-token pricing, Github is increasing the cost of Sonnet from 1 "premium request" per Sonnet prompt to 9, thus meaning that those users will be able to submit 1/9th the number of prompts per month before incurring additional usage charges. For all practical purposes, this is a straightforward 9x increase in price.
moontear
Not quite. Premium models have different type of multipliers applied. The multiplier decides how many PRUs (premium request units or tokens) are used. These PRUs are replaced with different units with this announcement but the methodology remains the same: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/concepts/billing/copilot-...
Sometimes the multiplier increase is significant like for Claude Opus 4.6 from 3x to 27x (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...), meaning using that model will use up a lot more „tokens“ (whatever the new word for it is)
jadbox
Dang, Gemini 3 Pro also jumped: 1->6
drumttocs8
It's amazing how much I was able to build for $40/mo- something that would have taken a team of 100 twice the time just a few years ago.
Will always be grateful for the greed of trillion dollar corporations that subsidized me.
c-hendricks
I'm starting to see comments like this in a new light after using some primarily AI-coded apps the past few weeks. They are a lot like apps that were built by hundreds of developers/product people over years and years, in the worst ways.
Inconsistent design patterns from page to page, half baked features, inconsistent documentation (but BOY is there ever a lot of it!), NIH ui component libraries that don't act like you'd expect. All that fun stuff.
It's like they speedran the worst parts of enterprise apps.
satvikpendem
True but they wouldn't have existed otherwise. If they're end user apps, users generally don't care about the code because they never see it.
matheusmoreira
I made so much progress on my personal projects, I actually regret not subscribing sooner. I've been coding alone for over a decade. It's been great having a coding buddy for a change. I'm actually going to miss it.
undefined
dang
(This was originally posted to Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47921248, but in a perhaps-futile effort to keep the discussions partitioned, Maxwell's demon will move it to the Copilot pricing thread.)
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.
fomoz
Bingo. I created a few autonomous skills that did exactly that for plan review, implementation, and branch review, review autonomously until green.
I was using 100M+ tokens per day, $250 per day or so and only paying $160 per month to GitHub.
I cancelled my GHCP sub and switched to Codex last week, so far so good but I miss Gemini 3.1 Pro for UI work.
nonfamous
And this, right here, is why none of us can have nice, cheap things.
alexandra_au
It was going to happen regardless due to the nature of enshittification. If they really wanted to stop people using 100M tokens a day, they could've prevented it years ago.
4gotunameagain
So, silicon valley decides to use their playbook of expand at all costs by burning money to acquire the market (like a carcinoma), and it is the users fault ?
Should we be blamed about uber destroying the taxi business, or airbnb the hotel one? Oh sorry, "disrupting".
Uber was dirt cheap, now it is the same price as taxis, and the people working for it (the "partners", not employees) have no social benefits.
Airbnb was cheap and humane, now it is THE cause for housing crises and massive residential property "investment".
The playbook of silicon valley is destructive, not disruptive.
It is by design aimed towards wealth accumulation. The ones with most money can capture the market, and make even more. It really is late stage capitalism.
And the more wealth inequality there is, the more pain, poverty and instability will be as well. AI will only exacerbate this.
hakunin
Yeah it was crazy. Nowadays I use pi with OpenAI GPT 5.4/5.5, which to me seems both better and more generous than Claude. I supplement it with OpenCode Zen to get access to a bunch of models at token cost, and OpenCode Go ($10/mo) to get subscription-style access to Kimi, GLM and friends.
bryanhogan
What is pi?
undefined
johndough
That was not my experience. When I tried to use Opus for longer tasks with Copilot, it would fill up the context completely and then crash without any output, while still consuming premium requests. (At least from September 2025 to January this year. Haven't tried after that.)
bubbab
Copilot has improved immensely in 2026. I'd say to give it a try again if you're up for it. It works about as well as Claude Code these days in my experience.
johndough
Unfortunately, Opus was removed from the student plan in March. So far, I had been happy with GPT-5.3-Codex, but that model seems to have been removed this morning.
oezi
So enormously that the haven't had any sane permission system built in this year.
hakunin
On pi coding agent, it worked very well for me over the past few months, but started glitching more recently, just prior to this announcement.
self_awareness
This might be Pi being buggy as heck.
When using opencode or copilot CLI, the error messages are displayed normally and it's possible to see what's going on. Under Pi, it sometimes just hangs, or Pi crashes with some bun stacktrace and that's it.
Copilot has introduced additional limits for Claude models in past month, and it's rather easy to hit it. Pi often doesn't show anything when this limit hits (although sometimes it shows the error, I guess it depends on Pi version).
Squarex
Even more so, questions and user answers from agents were not charged as separate requests.
SeriousM
And when you make your harness ask you for next steps in a tool call, the journey continues forever, yeehaa
mohsen1
This was my solution to very very though compiler tests that would take sometime up to 4 hours to figure out. Some of the time would be spent on running the tests, but still... I was burning so much tokens. I have free Copilot for my open source work so I wasn't even paying the $20.
this is the project that I am working on https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz
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pojzon
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.
krzyk
Yeah, people learned.
I created a 4 subagents that polled for new tasks, and restart after ~5h.
It was a great run.
NSPG911
exactly why i loved Github Copilot, you could pull of these shenanigans, and nothing would ever happen. That was the best part of it
but now, you get literally nothing
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!"
canada_dry
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."
parliament32
A whopping 100km per month for the low price of $199.99!*
* with a quota of 138 meters per hour, overage charges may apply
adgjlsfhk1
more like 100m
larschdk
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.
Hamuko
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.
SomeUserName432
Having rented cars a lot, this is actually quite common.
tsanzer
What country, I haven't seen anything but unlimited miles for over a decade.
SomeUserName432
I referred to the swapping of cars to a far inferior model than you paid for.
However I do also pay for milage (KM), and extending the rental period does often* NOT extend the milage range. Eg 1 month=1000 KM, 2 months=1000 KM, so you need to split the rental periods yourself and do all that hassle, or pay extra.
(*May of course vary depending on the rental company)
This being in Brazil.
Waterluvian
"Your monthly fee isn't changing but it now only covers about 3 days of driving."
predkambrij
More like, The Porsche you had for a month you'll now have for 5 min only.
croes
More like, the rising gas prices aren’t a problem, I only ever fill up for $40
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?
0xffff2
I'm curious about the opposite: Why would anyone use the CLI when, at least with Copilot, the VSCode plugin is super tightly integrated with VSCode, meaning the agent can see everything I can see. There's no mismatch in linter calls where I can see a lint in the ide that the agent can't find for example. I've had this problem even using CC in their VSCode extension, so I can't imagine it's not an issue in the CLI as well.
What's actually better in the CLI?
sz4kerto
We need sandboxing for any agent, so we run it within Docker - so we use CLI.
0xffff2
I use vscode with containers extensively. Not sure why containers imply CLI.
nl
I use the Claude Code VSCode plugin for 80% of my work.
I prefer it because I can look at the code (although not as often anymore) and config (very often!) easily.
It also lets me jump to previous conversations easily.
There are a few cases where the CLI makes sense. One big one is if you are running multiple simultaneous sessions on a remote server using Tmux to have them preconfigured when you reconnect is nice.
Bun in general I don't see the benefit either.
krzyk
You can look at the code in editor or IDE even when CLI agent is doing work.
I do that when I want to, but for me using agents in IDE is like looking with one eye covered.
Austizzle
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
saratogacx
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.
sefrost
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.
everfrustrated
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.
data-ottawa
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.
brunoborges
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:
zmj
Yeah, I've been using it heavily at work since the beginning of January (and have a personal Anthropic sub to compare to). Copilot CLI is pretty good, honestly. Most new features in Claude Code get cloned by Copilot CLI within a couple weeks. Claude models seem mildly more clumsy in that harness than the one they're trained on - subjective guess around 20% more turns for an equivalent task - but it's not a noticeable difference in the final output.
KronisLV
> 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.
baby_souffle
> also the autocomplete in Visual Studio Code which was really great across a bunch of files <...> I wonder what other good autocomplete is out there.
I am in the same boat. I tried looking for tab/auto-complete implementations ~ a year ago and it was pretty disappointing. If that has changed, would love to know!
referenceo
Windsurf has free unlimited tab complete, I use it as an IDE alongside Claude Code and it works pretty well. I think Google's Antigravity also has free tab complete but no idea if its any good.
tjhei
Cursor (paid) and antigravity (free) come to mind.
WorldMaker
That's espoused as the big reason for the price increase: most Copilot subscribed developers it seems have moved to "agentic usage" with the CLI and Cloud-based agents.
Which feels a bit like a kick in the pants for me as a developer that was primarily using Copilot for VS Code ghost text and very rarely used the Chat sidebar much less "agentic" tools.
Copilot Pro sort of made sense for my personal account when amortized across a year, but I don't want to "waste" $10/month on credits I won't use most months.
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.
Latty
I expect in the future we'll find out that someone in the industry was juicing the numbers with fake thinking tokens or something. The whole pricing model of charging you for the tokens it generates while not knowing how much it is going to generate going in has always been pretty crazy.
ThunderSizzle
It reminds of early smart phones when the cell providers pulled away from unlimited data...and then they brought it back in s few years.
I think competition will get fierce. We see many people are attracted to the price stability of GHCP - it became clear what a request could do - the problem is that they didn't match results with cost. It's not clear what a 5 hour usage window in Claude Code can do.
There's no reason the harness couldn't provide a quote on the next request, aside from it takes effort and it would be upfront to the user, creating expectations.
Sohcahtoa82
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.
benoau
Internet usage when you billed by the hour but your connection was so slow it took a minute plus to load pages lol.
tencentshill
It incentivizes you to do most of that prompting on your own hardware/time, and only feed the final prompt with only necessary context to the big AI in the sky. It might even force you to think about the problems yourself for a bit!
DaiPlusPlus
> I wonder how long it'll be before all AI costs are flat unlimited monthly fees or even free across the board, without compromise.
That's already the case if you can self-host an LLM; you don't even need a mythical H200: gamer-grade GeForce cards can get you a long way there (if this page is to be believed: https://www.runpod.io/gpu-compare/rtx-5090-vs-h200 )
...after RAM prices return to normalcy, of course - and then wait another 2 or 3 generations of GPU development for a 96GB HBM card to hit the streets - and also assuming SotA or cloud-only LLMs don't experience lifestyle-inflation, but I assume they must, because OpenAI/Anthropic/Etc's business-model depends on people paying them to access them, so it's in their interests to make it as difficult as possible to run them locally.
Give it 5 years from now and reassess.
Ballas
That page compares models that easily fit inside the ram on either GPU. The biggest difference comes when one card can fit a model and the other cannot.
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.
Incipient
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.
simonw
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!
computerex
There is no way to make that cost model profitable consistently. If 1 prompt can mean 100's/1000's of requests over hours, and you only pay for that 1 premium prompt, that can never be profitable.
cyanydeez
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
Lihh27
per-request was broken, yeah. but $10 of monthly credits is basically just a prepaid wallet with a reset timer.
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.
koyote
As someone who works in a Microsoft shop with Copilot, I am curious to see what happens.
Due to data governance it will be difficult to move to a different provider.
At the same time, this price hike is so large that the ROI on copilot will be a net negative.
I think what will ultimately happen is that we will not pay Microsoft more than we currently do and we'll simply end up with less AI usage in the company and a reduction in productivity.
datacynic
I also suspect that there are many "slow-moving", Microsoft heavy enterprises but with in-house devs that can't get anything but Copilot approved, and Microsoft trusts this will remain so.
It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.
hightrix
As a single data point, this is absolutely true. At my current "Big Corp", Copilot was immediately approved while Claude is entering month 2 or 3 of trying to get approval.
Additionally, we got copilot for every user, including those that never write code or use AI tools.
NSPG911
Opus 4.6 "Fast" was originally at 10x, literally the same cost as Opus 4.1. After promotion period, it was 30x.
ramon156
yes. even in my province that's relatively behind on tech, at least +-20% were already strongly relying on Microsoft (Azure) and thought adopting Copilot was a no-brainer. That ofcourse comes with autonomous programming, because we're paying for it anyway!
These companies already lost the spark/innovation years ago. They're just using LLM's as a way to survive. Wonder how long that lasts.
JBlue42
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.
WatchDog
I'm at an org, where every medium to large company meeting talks about AI in similar breathless non-specific terms, yet m365 copilot is the only approved AI chat, and GH copilot the only AI coding tool.
csomar
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.
curtisblaine
I really hope that they think so and that they're wrong and they get burned hard. Them and all the AI labs that lied, stole, inflated, hoarded and tried to justify all this as an existential moment where AGI would radically change society. I hope their calculus to reel in paying users is all wrong and now they all crash and burn instead of recouping VC money.
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.
0xffff2
I never played any games like that, but simply giving the agent a clear exit criteria and instructions to check the exit criteria every time it thinks it's done on a complex task was often enough to keep it chugging away for most of a day on a single prompt in my experience. Per-prompt pricing just isn't sustainable period, even if everyone is acting in good faith.
Sohcahtoa82
Charging by prompt was always wild to me.
I once asked it to do a comprehensive security review of our code. It churned for nearly an hour (and then produced 90% false positives). Insane that that usage was charged the same amount as me just saying "Hello".
_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.
sottol
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.
Waterluvian
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.
Incipient
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!
bsdz
Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?
minimaxir
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.
vdfs
Economics of scale don't scale
_pdp_
It seems to me more expensive but I might be reading it wrong.
infecto
Looking at their pricing it does not look the case.
ihsw
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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...