GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

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.

GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.

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.

Seems like folks would be better off with OpenRouter instead.

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?

You can pay with crypto though, which seems to be convenient for people under sanctions or with limited access, or if you are in low-tax jurisdiction (e.g. HK)

That said I think few people using openrouter are actually being selective about providers.

It took half a day to get my opencode setup, was not friendly. A lot of manually cross referencing model and providers. I was actually mainly optimizing for relatively fast providers. It all is super fragile and I'm sure half out of date; I have no idea if these picks are still fast, no promises they are still the same price (pretty terrifying honestly).

I'm mostly on coding plans so it doesn't super affect me. But man is it a bother to maintain.

And while i do not spend 200$ privat, in my startup we discussed this and our current mental model is, that instead of hiring someone new, we prefer to have more money for tokens.

This is easier for us and has a bigger benefit. The cost of a new / first employee is very high, a 200$ subscription is not. Upgrading that to lets say 400 or 800$ is still alot easier and if i can run multiply and better agents with that money, lets goooo.

And Gemma 4 and other open models can easily be hosted even for schools.

Another reason to hate that word.

From a different perspective, you were granted an incredible gift from the companies who let you use their product on their dime. Hopefully you made the most of it when you had the opportunity.

Okay then this AI stuff isn’t an example of that even under your definition.

I've been wanting to get off MS more generally and this is good motivation. Will be playing round with OR this week.

Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code? Otherwise to pay 5.5% on all your tokens just so it's slightly easier to swap providers (ie. changing a few urls?)

Yep, you can plug deepseek/kimi/minimax into claude code just fine. Or run everything through another harness like opencode instead.

Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.

Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.

> billing

Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.

> reliability

They increase reliability?

> middleware

Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.

> Apple still charges 30%.

3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.

For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.

A single point of access with a single key for all of these things is a worthwhile convenience.

Still worth it IMO to be able to switch from Provider A to Provider B if Provider A is having a bad day.

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

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

One theory I think Matt Levine posited, is that SpaceX will go public with dual-class stock that gives Elon control even with a minority ownership stake, and will subsequently buy Tesla, which doesn't have dual class stock, making SpaceX the singular "Elon Musk company", with him having operational control despite being public.

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?

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...]

Now, I have this high-resolution shiny object that can near instantaneously get any information I want along with _streaming HD video to it_ *anywhere*.

15 years even feels like a stone age. I can't fathom what it has to feel like people in their 60s and 70s.

That's very close to a normal day in 1996. The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper. The news was not any more interesting or informative because of that. I guess I can also still do the loop reasonably well, but I'm a lot slower than I was in 1996 when I was a cross-country state champion.

My parents are closing in on 70 and I guess I can't speak for them, but I'm at least aware of the daily routines of their lives, too. Walk the dog, do housework, DIY building projects, visit kids and grankids. Seems much the same, too, with the biggest difference being they're now teaching my sister's sons to play baseball rather than me, but shit, one of her sons even looks like exactly the same way I looked when I was 7! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Housework meant no laundry machine, no dishwasher, and possibly no vacuum cleaner. That means hand washing everything, and beating rugs with sticks and brushes to get the dust off of them.

I look at the life my kids live, and it's not so different to my childhood. The toys are similar, their housing is similar. Probably the biggest difference is the availability of content on demand rather than much more fixed TV schedules.

The big difference in the last 30 years hasn't so much been in the kind of middle class life you can live, but the number of people who live that kind of life. In the 90s 40% of people globally were living in extreme poverty. Now its under 10%. The kinds of lives the middle class live in China and Vietnam are closer to those of Europeans today, when even 30 years ago most people in those countries were living much closer to the way your dad grew up.

I wonder if AI will result in a step change of living standards? Perhaps along with robotics we'll finally get to do nothing at all at home? I'm not convinced it'll be quick though. Maybe another 30 years.

I am just over 50 myself and I agree with your points. Technology has changed but life is largely very similar to wear it was in the 90s. At least day to day. Attitudes are way worse now.

I always wonder the views of older people. My parents are very technology forward and have been my entire life so it is difficult to gauge how different life is compared to when they were growing up.

It's easy to hear "Oh well I only had 640kb of memory and typed programs out of a magazine I got in the mail!" and see as distinct from having 'unlimited' resources and the internet.

Your insight is good ("The biggest difference is I read the news on my phone instead of a physical newspaper") that life sort of stays the same but the modality changes. People still go to the store like they did in the mid-1800s but now it is by car.

I wonder what our "industrial revolution" will be where the previous generation lived (ie: out in the country on a farm) totally different lives to the current (ie: in the city in a factory). Maybe when space travel and multi-planetary living is normalized?

Since I was there (young, but there), I want to point out that this crosses three eras which all felt quite different:

    1978: typed programs in from a magazine or loaded from a cassette (16kB, TRS-80)
    1983: loaded programs from a floppy (64kB, Apple ][ and C64 etc)
    1988: loaded programs from a hard disk (640kB, IBM PC and Mac).

But - now they are easier - I can read books on an e-ink screen and pretty much instantly find what I want to read next. I get my news on a phone. I used to watch TV/movies broadcast or on tape rentals. Now, I have just about everything I could ever want available - without ADs... those were such a time-waster.

What has changed is that I have access to MORE information than my local (or school) libraries could ever provide - in a variety of more accessible formats. Whatever tools I need to get "work done", I can find a myriad of free and open-source options.

But - the overall days and household family routines are the same - now, instead of reading a paper book while waiting to pickup my kids (or other family members) "back-in-the-day", I can read my device, or connect with my DIY communities online on my phone - or learn something new. I don't have to schedule life around major broadcast events, I can easily do many tasks while I am "out-and-about".

Friction has been reduced.

And at some point even frontier model costs will hopefully come down (if there is still a meaningful difference between closed and open source models at that point) as all of the compute that's being built out right now comes online.

Not sure how it all works out. Currently trillion dollar companies can't make a native app for platforms. Everything is just JS/Electron because economics does not work for them.

And here companies can make GW data center running very expensive GPUs for 1/10th of current prices. Sound little fanciful to me.

It has been years now, of cash injections, investors can't keep feeding the beast forever.

That would be, even is, the smart thing to do.