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The golden age of Microsoft\u2019s Github Copilot appears to be at an end \u2014 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\u2019re supposed to balance the monthly budget. <\/p>\n
The changes, which will take place June 1<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Some developers with financial whiplash have taken to places like Reddit and X to bemoan what \u2014 in many cases \u2014\u00a0appears to be a drastic escalation in cost. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat a joke,\u201d one Redditor recently wrote<\/a>, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month. \u201cThis new usage model is just stupidly expensive. I\u2019m adjusting mine by cancelling. At that cost, it is no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical way.\u201d<\/p>\n Another user posted<\/a> \u201cWOW, didn\u2019t expect new pricing model to be this ridiculous,\u201d sharing a screenshot that appeared to show that their costs had shot up from around $50 to some $3,000. <\/p>\n The increases sound extreme. However, some Copilot users have bitten back at this criticism \u2014 noting that, if you know what you\u2019re doing, you really shouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThe vast difference between some of us working all day and still barely having overage and then these screenshots. I struggle to believe it\u2019s complexity differences in the workload,\u201d wrote one user. \u201cThe only way it gets crazy like that is if you are purely \u2018vibe coding\u2019 with a ton of bloated iterations,\u201d they later added. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty affordable for even small outfits if used as a tool, on pretty much any provider.\u201d<\/p>\n Others have focused on the mind-boggling economics behind the company\u2019s previous model. \u201cHoly fuck how much money was copilot losing,\u201d one Redditor asked in a recent post<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a good question. <\/p>\n The economics behind Copilot have not always seemed so easy to grasp, and the amount that the company must have spent to subsidize the ongoing vibe-coding escapades of its user base is similarly mysterious and hidden from public view. <\/p>\n While some have criticized the changes and others have critiqued those critiques, still other online voices have argued that developers have a perfectly good reason to be upset, given that Microsoft encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now appear to be pulling the rug out from under them. <\/p>\n \u201cTo all the people blaming\u2026the people who actually used the system the way that Microsoft built it (and even encouraged it to be used this way), honestly the only one at fault here is Microsoft. Microsoft provided this billing method and they kept making it easier and easier to burn through massive numbers of tokens on single premium requests that could churn for hours or even days while spawning dozens or even hundreds of sub-agents,\u201d one user wrote. <\/p>\n TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but did not hear back by publication time. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n