Their "API pricing" is exactly the same as that of providers: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing...
Seems a massive loss for Microsoft. 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 think VSCode only supports copilot for "autocomplete" too
on top of that, you need GitHub Copilot for the PR reviewer functionality in GitHub
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.
Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.
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.
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...]
It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.
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.
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.
I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.
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.
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.
Pretty sure that's what they will eventually do
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?
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.
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.
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
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's a convenience cost, for sure, but it's not valueless in a fast-moving world. Certainly if you're comfortable with one provider and it's cheaper, do that.
OpenRouter is guaranteed to be about the highest margin operator in the business right now. Everyone wishes they'd be them, skimming 5% off as the middleman without any OpEx.
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.
Now they just increase the price to buy it back
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.
I'm guessing they did that (and the 'temporary bonus credits') to make the pill easier to swallow for that side of customers.
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.
Also, Opus 4.7 seems like a model more intended to save Anthropic money than push the bar.
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.
How so? By all accounts I've read so far it uses more tokens overall for roughly the same results.
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.
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.
Will always be grateful for the greed of trillion dollar corporations that subsidized me.
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.
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.
this is the project that I am working on https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz
I would say its a x1000 increase in price for agentic workflows.
but now, you get literally nothing
Isn't this like saying "The Porsche you rented at $200/mo is now a Honda. But the price hasn't changed!"
* with a quota of 138 meters per hour, overage charges may apply
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.
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?
What's actually better in the CLI?
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.
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
Personally I got CLI fatigue and am happy with Conductor for now, but things are moving fast in this space.
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 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 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!
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.
Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now
https://bradygaster.github.io/squad/
If I have the same repo also open in VSCode, it’s also aware of that fact, so you can give it context (a file or selected lines of code).
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
It's not turning consumption based because there are a ton of these licenses just sitting idle.
Additionally, we got copilot for every user, including those that never write code or use AI tools.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.
If I could run a local model comparable to even Sonnet 4.6 without shelling out $50K in hardware, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But all I have is a 32 GB of RAM and an old RTX 4080.
Or am I not up to speed? Are there decent coding models that can run on dev laptops? Not that that's what you were suggesting by recommending a local model, necessarily; just curious.
With this pricing change, I see no reason at all to stick with Copilot in principle, but I really need to solve this issue of IDE integration to move on.
Other than that Zed has a similar experience which is pretty decent.
* By which I mean the good one, whatever it's called now - the part of Copilot that used to be a plugin and is now part of VS Code, not the thing that has always been part of VS Code.
Also heard of more and more people moving to Kilo Code or OpenChamber instead.
Inference economics are going to be brutal in 2026 H2 when DeepSeek's new infra and model improvements come online, and Kimi launches K3. By brutal, I mean for OpenAI and Anthropic.
> What is the benefit of using the Copilot Pro+ at 39$/month instead of using the Copilot Pro at 10$/month and paying for extra usage?
When I see how fast Codex max thinking GPT 5.5 eats our enterprise seat credits almost anything else seems cheap (until we switch our live systems from 5.4 api to 5.5 api I guess)... good thing I'm not the one paying for those credits and tokens (which is probably how most of the money is going to be made on AI going forward, borderline free chatbots for normies are done)
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'm a copilot subscriber since 2022)
Opus 4.6 3x -> 27x
Opus 4.7 3x -> 27x
GPT 5.4 1x -> 6x
> 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).
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.
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...
This is just the start of the rug-pull
The issue currently is capacity. Servicing the models cost just peanuts of electricity but the popularity is killing them.
> 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.
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 wouldn't mind a plan between Free and Pro that is just "all I care about is code completion and next edit suggestions".
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.
One of the largest employers publicly engaging in a project which has the outcome of depressing wages. It's easier to "get" if you don't take the trillion dollar gorilla at face value.
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.
They explicitly stated that they won't be doing that: the multipliers go into effect in June for everyone, annual plan or not.
But companies do lots of illegal things, and in general nobody takes them to court over it.
For example, the German Civil Code states:
Section 308 - Prohibited clauses with the possibility of valuation
In standard business terms, the following in particular are ineffective:
[...]
4. (Reservation of the right to modify) the agreement of a right of the user [TL note: this means beneficiary of the terms, eg. party or other subject of the contract] to modify the performance promised or deviate from it, unless the agreement of the modification or deviation reasonably can be expected of the other party to the contract when the interests of the user are taken into account;"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.
Flat subscriptions had one big advantage: zero cognitive overhead per request. That's worth more than people admit.
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.
Why does everyone care about gas prices I only ever pay $20 for gas?
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.
[1] https://apfel.franzai.com/ [2] https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe
Z/Mimo already raised their prices multiple times since the promotional prices at the start of the year.
Were you able to see assisted AI coding savings proportional to costs increase now you are going to get?
Companies removed people as AI assisted coding will be cheaper and now coding cost are going up from fixed $X to non-deterministic. The posts by Uber few days back about spending 12 months' worth of money in 4 months tells a lot.
Only path forward seems using Open-source models and many companies don't use Chinese that makes only Mistral one as the option.
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.
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.
- I plan everything in ChatGPT. I provide project trees and create an execution plan for Claude Code, Codex, or Copilot agents. - I clearly say I do not want the agent to explain what it will do or what it did. I only want "I finished". That saves extra tokens. My projects include tools to gather file contents in bulk. A single command like bun copy-paste FILES="<file1> <file2>" lets the agent collect many files into one file. - I also provide a bun create-empty-files command so the agent can create all needed files at once instead of one by one.
With this setup, I managed to build 4 major features (more than 80 file edits or creations) using the 3 daily resets on a standard plan.
This is the VSCode autocomplete stuff right? Really enjoy this.
> Copilot code review will also consume GitHub Actions minutes, in addition to GitHub AI Credits. These minutes are billed at the same per-minute rates as other GitHub Actions workflows.
That sucks.
having seen tens of millions of tokens (total; albeit not split by type) for a plan-agent workflow of a simple few line change, they should be also spending time on optimizing their internal orchestration.
i think the claude licensing on time-based limits would have been the least frustrating outcome, even if for the short-term. anyways, it was fun while it lasted (especially when opus 4.6 was initially 1x lol).
also, recession indicator anyone?
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.
That's exactly where the subsidy is being removed.
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.
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.
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 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.
i tried the continue vscode extension, and it seemed kind of janky. are there better options?
-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.
And DeepSeek V4 Flash is comparable to Gemini Flash at also a fraction of the cost.
These models are just quite chatty from my experience. Only downside.
And DeepSeek is planning to deploy to their own Huawei TPUs, halving their already cheap prices.
The plan is to normalize spending hundreds/thousands on tokens per month for the productivity you gain.
See Jensen Huang’s comment that every $500k developer should spend at least $250k worth of tokens per year.
That is, redact copilot from the bill for customers that dont use it.
[0] - Last weeks changes limited my personal Copilot Pro account but not my Work one
Google won
AI itself clearly weaker / dumber. Prices increased manyfold.