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.

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.

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.

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

Enterprise gets pooled credits and will like having everything go through one place so I think it still works.

Is there a way to use the autocomplete feature with an api?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know if it's just me but copilot kind of sucks. I've been running local models with like 9b parameters and they are about as good if not better. Obviously there's no integrations or whatever and I get most people are probably paying for that than anything else but eh. Big no thanks from me.

Why would folks be better paying 5.5% fee to OpenRouter ("Open") if most people just use one or two providers? Just use the provider's API.

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

FYI, these are the multipliers for annual plan. I would hazard a guess most people are not on an annual plan

What's annoying is that it's obvious. In the case of GPT 5.5, if Copilot is going to charge 7.5x what GPT 5.4 costs while OpenAI themselves via the API/Codex only charges 2x of what GPT 5.4 costs, that will immediately raise an eyebrow.

We can't even get slop delivery worked out. So use SlopAggregator instead.

Everyone seems to believe OpenRouter isn't subsidizing but, until they publish audited financials, I personally doubt it.

"eras" tend to not be so short lol

That's so unfair to us hard working developers. A month ago i could buy for .4$ a turn with Sonnet. Now i have to pay at least .9$ for this turn. Weeks ago i could buy for .12$ an Opus turn after they already raised prices and now they want .27$ from me for the same product! They are stealing from us!

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.

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.

They could add rollover balances and be back to cell phone plans in the early 2000s.

Are you thinking something like rollover plans?

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.)

Even more so, questions and user answers from agents were not charged as separate requests.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

More like, The Porsche you had for a month you'll now have for 5 min only.

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.

"Your monthly fee isn't changing but it now only covers about 3 days of driving."

It’s technically true that the plan prices haven’t changed, it’s just the value you get from those plans has plummeted. It’s classic deceptive sales language.

More like, the rising gas prices aren’t a problem, I only ever fill up for $40

It's more like saying, "and you may now only use the Porsche for 5 minutes out of every day."

They are now charging per gallon instead of a flat rate per trip

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?

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's in their ToS to allow using Copilot subscription with OpenCode - https://github.blog/changelog/2026-01-16-github-copilot-now-...

Absolutely the cheapest way to get a lot of tokens through a solid harness for $10/month. Until now

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:

https://github.com/github/copilot-sdk/

I'm just so confused why people aren't just using ghostty/kitty/terminal.app and claude code. Compared to the other approaches I've tried, it's by far the most effective way to get performance from opus 4.6/4.7

Quite honestly I love the GitHub Copilot CLI. I pair it with Squad and it’s awesome.

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).

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.

I've used it. It's on par with OpenCode imho.

I've been using it for a few months because Copilot was the only AI blessed by our corporate overlords. It's not bad, I would say it's about 80% as capable as Claude Code, which I've used extensively on personal projects. However CC was recently approved, and I'm betting that with these changes to Copilot pricing we'll end up dropping it like a hot potato.

I tried the VS Code + Copilot sidebar approach a few months ago. It was definitely rough around the edges compared to Cursor/Claude. In our corporate environment, we weren't even able to use frontier models.

Because Copilot is the only thing allowed at our corp

it's my favourite harness so far

Search has become so bad that I also struggled to find Claude Code alternative and made my own tight (not editors, not plugins, not agents, strictly similar to Claude Code CLI) list: https://github.com/omarabid/cli-llm-coding

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).

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.

per-request was broken, yeah. but $10 of monthly credits is basically just a prepaid wallet with a reset timer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> I really don't get it.

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.

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!

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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".

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.

Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?

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!

You can use Copilot Chat* with basically any API provider, and if you switch to the VS Code Insiders build you can configure it to use literally any OpenAI API-compatible endpoint.

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.

I used to feel exactly like you do, but now I use the Claude CLI exclusively and am very pleased with the results.

Try Cline, a vscode plugin that's been around since the start and has really active development. You can also use most providers as well.

Already cancelled here! One less thing tied to GitHub.

It’s getting there. You could give a try with qwen 3.6. It’s worth paying for better models in the cloud, but local models are now better than nothing.

Use llama.cpp or better yet Unsloth Studio

One nice development recently was ollama's support for MLX optimization on Mac hardware. It's not obvious how to know you're using a model that works with it, yet, so it's rough around the edges.

https://ollama.com/blog/mlx

Check out Zed sometime, its pretty decent too.

Some models, for example Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, are only available on Pro+; Pro+ has audit logs and GitHub Spark; that's about it, as far as I can tell from https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/copilot/g...

If I had to guess...

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.

Same! I wonder what other alternatives there might be for autocomplete.

Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions remain free with Copilot Pro.

I'm similarly thinking about sticking with the auto-downgrade back to Copilot Free when the annual sub ends and then just yelling about it any months I hit the 2000 completion cap.

I wouldn't mind a plan between Free and Pro that is just "all I care about is code completion and next edit suggestions".

Sounds like you're a candidate for a local model. It's kinda nice not caring what the token count means except as to compaction.

I thought of this as soon as I saw the headline: I hope this is the start. Crossing my fingers to see more line up with your predictions.

I think that only applies to held-over users on the annual plan:

> 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).

Not apples for apples.

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.

GPT 5.4mini is even worse, from 0.33x to 6x which is ~18 times more expensive now.

GPT 4.1 had a multiplier of 0.

In places with reasonable consumer protections (Australia, Germany) it almost certainly is illegal unless they give a full (whole year) refund. I think the short time limit of applying for a refund won't be looked at favorably either. Regardless of their ToS which I'm sure covers this.

But companies do lots of illegal things, and in general nobody takes them to court over it.

In order to most-to-least charitable, any of:

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.

I doubt you can force them to provide the service with the original terms, but you might be able to ask for a (partial) refund. If not today, after a week of verbal abuse they will receive for this online.

My thought exactly! First the usage limits + model limitations and now fundamental change to the billing. Hope some consumer watchdogs are looking into this!

100% it says in their terms that they can change the service during the agreement.

I just checked and you can cancel with a refund.

For the yearly plan they only change the model multiplier. And it's in the subscription contract they can change that multiplier at any time.

That was the first thing I turned off in VSCode. Autocomplete for my TypeScript projects was great. And the "AI" suggestions/completions were really getting in the way of me still being the "driver."

We all knew this from the very beginning but couldn't compete with OpenAI or Anthropic on their subscription-based pricing strategy. It was nuts except for those few corporations burning investor money to keep competition out as long as possible. Now they don't have to hide anymore that subscription pricing won't do it for ai. The pyramid scheme is falling.

The point is - if its the same or more expensive per month than a real human employee - why pay for AI ?

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.

It made more sense in the ye old days where a request was basically just a chat message in a sidebar and it could also edit code. Then saying someone can use 300 chat messages a month kinda makes sense.

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.

This approach started with the “Ask a question about your code” feature, which is more comparable to single chat message with relatively predictable token usage. Now it’s an agent who might work for 30 minutes, read the whole codebase, and write 1000 lines

I'm not usually a Conspiracy Guy, and the answer is probably `incompetence * tech_debt`. But I think that having sufficient layers of abstraction to any billing model is a useful way to hide the real cost of things. It's why it's done everywhere.

> rather low compared to what you could use same plan until now.

That's exactly where the subsidy is being removed.

I keep hearing that Codex is the best bang for your buck now.

It may already be cheaper if you calculate the hidden cost accumulated by LLM generated tech debt. At least some of it could be avoided by manually doing it better to begin with.

i like opencode's zen https://opencode.ai/en/zen with opencode's TUI.

I expect the prices to rise to almost cover the cost savings from layoffs at large companies.

Already there are companies paying more for coding tokens than for programmer salaries.

Yeah, local is clearly the future. Even beyond the cheap Chinese models you can install the apfel[1] stuff if you're on a mac and want a quick available onboard cli option. And I'm sure people will adapt the Flash-MoE[2] integration to be even better soon as well.

[1] https://apfel.franzai.com/ [2] https://github.com/danveloper/flash-moe

DeepSeek will do the same thing.

Z/Mimo already raised their prices multiple times since the promotional prices at the start of the year.

What "goodwill"? It's just more "AI credits" for what will be a shit product in June.

Re 1: Current models don't solve coding. They are useful tool for it though.

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.

It's less surprise, but more confusing given the game theory as their competitors are not doing the same thing and the multiplier changes alone will likely churn current users.