The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be at an end — for the little guy, at least. The company is switching its billing system from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system that has the potential to bill users at a significantly higher rate. Bigger enterprises may still have the juice for it, but smaller companies and workers could find themselves wondering how they’re supposed to balance the monthly budget.
The changes, which will take place June 1, mean that users will charged based on how many tokens they burn through as they work instead of a low flat rate based on requests.
Some developers with financial whiplash have taken to places like Reddit and X to bemoan what — in many cases — appears to be a drastic escalation in cost.
“What a joke,” one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month. “This new usage model is just stupidly expensive. I’m adjusting mine by cancelling. At that cost, it is no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical way.”
Another user posted “WOW, didn’t expect new pricing model to be this ridiculous,” sharing a screenshot that appeared to show that their costs had shot up from around $50 to some $3,000.
The increases sound extreme. However, some Copilot users have bitten back at this criticism — noting that, if you know what you’re doing, you really shouldn’t be blowing through quite so many tokens on a regular basis. The people spending this much are vibe-coders with little actual development knowledge, those critics maintain.
“The vast difference between some of us working all day and still barely having overage and then these screenshots. I struggle to believe it’s comple …