‘What a joke’: Github Copilot’s new token-based billing sparks panic among developers

The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to have come to an end — for the little guy, at least. The company is shifting its billing system from a fixed subscription rate to a token usage system that has the ability to bill users at a much higher rate. Larger companies may still have the power to make this happen, but small businesses and workers may find themselves wondering how to balance a monthly budget.

Changes that It will be held on June 1meaning that users will be charged based on the number of tokens they burn as they work rather than a lower fixed rate based on orders.

Some cash-strapped developers have taken to places like Reddit and X to bemoan what – in many cases – appears to be a radical cost escalation.

“What a joke,” one Redditor wrote Recently writtenclaiming that although they currently pay only about $29 per month, the new price will increase their costs to approximately $750 per month. “This new usage model is very expensive. I am modifying my model by canceling. At this cost, it is no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical way.”

last User posted “Wow, I didn’t expect the new pricing model to be this ridiculous,” they shared a screenshot showing their costs had gone from about $50 to about $3,000.

The increases seem extreme. However, some Copilot users have responded to these criticisms, pointing out that if you know what you’re doing, you really shouldn’t be blowing away a lot of tokens on a regular basis. These critics assert that the people who spend this amount are programmers with little actual knowledge of development.

“The difference is huge between some of us working all day and still barely aging and then these screenshots. I have a hard time believing it’s complex differences in workload,” one user wrote. They later added: “The only way it gets crazy like that is if you’re just ’emotion coding’ with lots of inflated repetitions.” “It’s affordable even for a small garment if used as a tool, on almost any provider.”

Others focused on the amazing economics behind the company’s previous model. “Holy shit, how much money was the co-pilot losing,” one Redditor said he asked in a recent post.

It’s a good question.

The economics behind Copilot have not always been easy to understand, and the amount the company must spend to support the ongoing coding operations of its user base is similarly vague and hidden from public view.

While some have criticized the changes and others have criticized those criticisms, other voices online still argue that developers have perfectly valid reason to be upset, given that Microsoft has encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now appears to be pulling the rug out from under them.

“To all the people blaming…people who actually used the system the way Microsoft built it (and even encouraged it to be used that way), frankly, the only person at fault here is Microsoft. Microsoft introduced this billing method and continues to make it easier to burn massive numbers of tokens based on single distinct requests that can last for hours or even days while producing dozens or even hundreds of sub-agents,” one user wrote.

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but did not receive a response by press time.