GitHub Copilot Is Moving To Usage-Based Billing 15
GitHub said in a blog post today that it is moving Copilot to usage-based billing starting June 1. Base subscription prices will remain the same but premium requests will be replaced with monthly AI Credits that are consumed based on token usage.
"Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage," the platform said. "Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model. This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users."
Documentation for individuals, businesses and enterprises, and an FAQ can be found at their respective links.
"Instead of counting premium requests, every Copilot plan will include a monthly allotment of GitHub AI Credits, with the option for paid plans to purchase additional usage," the platform said. "Usage will be calculated based on token consumption, including input, output, and cached tokens, using the listed API rates for each model. This change aligns Copilot pricing with actual usage and is an important step toward a sustainable, reliable Copilot business and experience for all users."
Documentation for individuals, businesses and enterprises, and an FAQ can be found at their respective links.
So zero, then? (Score:3)
Sweet, so almost everyone will be charged zero for the thing they aren't using.
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Nah, everyone will be charged through the nose for all the things they keep turning off but that keep being turned back on and jumping in front of the features they're trying to use.
I am so fed up with this timeline. Can we all, as a society, find a way to invent a time reset button, something that maybe takes us back to 1999, with some knowledge of what NOT to do this time around?
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Mod parent funny for "timeline" though it could be a multiverse joke.
Finding it increasingly hard to develop or sustain interest in any Slashdot stories these days. Personal problem with time? Or specific problems with each story? Or just the downwards trend in the quality of discussions? (But that might be a selective memory problem.)
On this story I have been considering GitHub sans Copilot as part of a solution approach to a problem created by a dying website. However this story puts the last nail in the
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Nah, everyone will be charged through the nose for all the things they keep turning off but that keep being turned back on and jumping in front of the features they're trying to use.
I am so fed up with this timeline. Can we all, as a society, find a way to invent a time reset button, something that maybe takes us back to 1999, with some knowledge of what NOT to do this time around?
First, you'd need to go back to before Reagan's rise, because he sort of lifted the "profit is the most important part" idealism up to where it started to become some weird innate law of nature that can not be overcome by common sense, logic, or ethical concerns. And then, somehow, you'd have to block that mentality from rising in some other way and then becoming some weird religion that drives everything we do as a society. That's really what led us to this point where corporate dictate outstrips all attem
The first hit is always free. (Score:4, Insightful)
They've been limiting requests for premium models to 300/month for quite a while now, and gradually removing the free models. The only free model left now is GPT-5 mini, which is nearly useless. I've moved on to Cursor AI. It is vastly superior to Github Copilot.
Expect AI to get a lot more expensive as people and companies become dependent on it. This is by design.
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> Expect AI to get a lot more expensive as people and companies become dependent on it. This is by design.
AI is being sold at a loss so prices will increase regardless. Investors are hoping companies become dependent on it but if they do it will be because it works. Right now we are in the experimentation stage and it is by no means clear that AI provides anything of lasting value.
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Yeah, this. All of the AI platforms have been operating at insane losses -- many estimates say $25-30 burned for every $1 in revenue, some say lots more, and that's without all the externalized costs.
It was never sustainable, and it will never be sustainable barring some tremendous breakthrough in efficiency of compute, or in cost of power generation. And I'm not talking about the ridiculous data-centers-in-space thing. Energy may be nearly free up there, but we have a hard enough time with the waste hea
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Until Cursor starts enshittifying.
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Expect AI to get a lot more expensive as people and companies become dependent on it. This is by design.
Expect AI to get a lot more expensive as providers realise that sitting around making loss after loss every quarter is not a sustainable business model. Seriously is there a single company whose AI division is currently in the black?
Buh Bye (Score:3)
Paywalling that intrusive privacy invading crap is great news.
Buh bye Copilot. Happy to see you go. Thanks Microslop.
Subscription Models (Score:2)
Clearly everyone was thinking this was going to be the gym model where the heavy users subsidize the light ones, and then a bunch of money off the people who even forgot they even subscribed. But when typical use is more than what they were picturing heavy use as, the whole thing breaks down.
Anthropic started the roll back of the subsidies with Claude Pro, now all the other providers can follow to try and shore up their business models.
Shifting the blame and cost (Score:2)
So they're asking users to pay for tokens despite a good portion of tokens being consumed for nothing because of the number of attempts it takes to generate anything usable.
It's like saying "our product is shit but we'll tell you it's your fault because the 100 prompts you wrote were not enough to make the statement of your simple task specific enough; and well charge you for all of it"
Pray that we do not alter it further (Score:2)
The experience on annual plans will change significantly: model multipliers will increase, and standard-tier models (currently 0x) will no longer be available, reflecting increased compute costs and the transition to usage-based billing, and no new models or features will be added to annual plans going forward.
And lest you think that buying an annual plan actually means getting that plan for the duration of its term... remember that we live in a free society where the Epstein class is allowed to change the terms of a "sale" unilaterally. At least they're offering a prorated conversion of the annual plans into the new-and-improved pay as you go plans, which might become somewhat attractive as the multipliers scale TO THE MOON and the annual plan becomes essentially worthless.