The golden age of Microsoft Github Copilot seems to be over. At least that’s true for the little guy. The company is transitioning its billing system from a flat subscription fee to a token-enabled system that allows it to bill users at much higher rates. While larger businesses still have room to spare, smaller businesses and workers may be wondering how to balance their monthly budgets.
The changes, which will take effect on June 1, mean users will be billed based on the number of tokens they consume while working, rather than a lower flat fee based on the request.
Some developers who are struggling financially have taken to places like Reddit and
“What a joke,” one Reddit user recently wrote, claiming that while he currently only pays about $29 a month, the new rates will increase his cost to nearly $750 a month. “This new usage model is prohibitively expensive. I’m canceling and adjusting my model. At that cost, it’s no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical way.”
“Wow, I had no idea the new pricing model would be this outrageous,” another user posted, sharing screenshots that appear to show the cost has jumped from about $50 to about $3,000.
The increase sounds extreme. However, some Copilot users dislike these criticisms. I pointed out that if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be wasting so many tokens on a regular basis. Critics claim that the people spending this much money are Vibe coders with little actual development knowledge.
“What a huge difference between some of us working all day and still doing very little overtime and this screenshot. I have a hard time believing that’s the difference in workload complexity,” one user wrote. “The only way it gets that crazy is if you do it purely through ‘vibe coding’ over a ton of iterations,” they later added. “Almost every provider has it as a tool, and it’s very affordable for even a small piece of equipment.”
Others focused on the incredible economics behind the company’s previous models. “Damn how much money the co-pilot lost,” one Redditor asked in a recent post.
That’s a good question.
Copilot’s economics have always seemed elusive, and how much the company has to spend to subsidize its user base’s ongoing Vibe coding escapades has been equally mysterious and hidden from the public eye.
While some have criticized the changes and others have criticized them, other online voices have argued that Microsoft has been encouraging users to use chatbots indiscriminately and now that it appears to be pulling the rug out from under them, developers have good reason to be upset.
“Everyone is to blame… those who actually used the system the way Microsoft built it (and even encouraged it to be used this way), and frankly the only one at fault here is Microsoft. They provided this billing method and have continued to make it easier and easier to burn huge numbers of tokens for a single premium request that can churn for hours or days while spawning dozens or even hundreds of sub-agents,” one user wrote.
TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment but did not hear back by the time of publication.
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