So 100 Opus requests a month? That's not a lot.

Cat's out of the bag now, and it seems they'll probably patch it, but:

Use other flows under standard billing to do iterative planning, spec building, and resource loading for a substantive change set. EG, something 5k+ loc, 10+ file.

Then throw that spec document as your single prompt to the copilot per-request-billed agent. Include in the prompt a caveat that We are being billed per user request. Try to go as far as possible given the prompt. If you encounter difficult underspecified decision points, as far as possible, implement multiple options and indicate in the completion document where selections must be made by the user. Implement specified test structures, and run against your implementation until full passing.

Most of my major chunks of code are written this way, and I never manage to use up the 100 available prompts.

	▲	readitalready 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is basically my workflow. Claude Code for short edits/repairs, VSCode for long generations from spec. Subagents can work for literally days, generation tens of thousands of lines of code with one prompt that costs 12 cents. There's even a summary of tokens used per session in Copilot CLI, telling me I've used hundreds of millions of tokens. You can calculate the eventual API value of that. Just at the absolute best deal in the AI market.

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likium 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For $10 flat per request up to 128k tokens they’re losing money. 100 * 100k is 10m tokens. At current api pricing that’s $50 input tokens, not even accounting for output!

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brushfoot 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And a request can consume more than 128k tokens.

A cloud agent works iteratively on your requests, making multiple commits.

I put large features into my requests and the agent has no problem making hundreds of changes.

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everfrustrated 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You didn't account for cached input tokens - some % of input tokens will be follow-on prompts which are billed at the cheaper cached token rate.

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indigodaddy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean aren't they losing money on everything even the API? This isn't going to end well with how expensive it all really is.

	▲	port11 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It might be a gym-type situation, where the average of all users just ends up being profitable. Of course it could be bait-and-switch to get people committed to their platform.
	▲	whynotmaybe 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Having worked some time in huge businesses, I can assure that there are many corporate copilot subscribers that never use it, that's where they earn money. In the past we had to buy an expensive license of some niche software, used by a small team, for a VP "in case he wanted to look". Worse in many gov agencies, whenever they buy software, if it's relatively cheap, everyone gets it.