The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be over, at least for this little guy. The company is switching its pricing structure from a flat subscription fee to a token-based system that could potentially charge users significantly higher fees. While large businesses may still have that extra headroom, small businesses and their employees may be wondering how to balance their monthly budgets.
The change, which will take place on June 1st, means users will be charged based on the number of tokens they consume while working, rather than a low flat fee based on requests.
Some financially strapped developers have taken to places like Reddit and X to lament what appears to be a significant increase in costs in many cases.
“What a joke,” one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that while he currently only pays about $29 a month, the new rate would push his costs to nearly $750 a month. “This new usage model is ridiculously expensive. I’m canceling and adjusting. At that cost, it’s no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical sense.”
“Wow, I had no idea the new pricing model was this ridiculous,” another user wrote, sharing a screenshot showing the cost jumping from about $50 to about $3,000.
The increased sound is extreme. However, some Copilot users push back against this criticism. They point out that if you know what you’re doing, you don’t need to spend that many tokens on a regular basis. Critics argue that the people spending this amount of money are just atmosphere programmers with little actual development knowledge.
“There’s a huge difference between people who work all day but have very little overtime and these screenshots. I can’t believe it’s the difference in workload complexity,” one user wrote. “The only way it can get weird like that is if you’re doing pure ‘atmosphere coding’ with tons of repetition,” they later added. “Used as a tool, even small costumes can be purchased at pretty affordable prices from almost any provider.”
Some have noted the incredible economics behind the company’s previous model. “Oh my god, how much money did the co-pilot lose?” one Redditor asked in a recent post.
That’s a good question.
The economics behind Copilot don’t necessarily seem to be easy to grasp, and the amount of money the company must have spent to subsidize the ongoing vibecoding practices of its user base is similarly mysterious and hidden from public view.
While some have criticized the changes and criticized those criticisms, some voices online argue that developers have good reason to be angry, given that Microsoft encouraged users to use chatbots indiscriminately and now appears to be pulling the rug out from under them.
“To all the people who are blaming…those who actually used (and encouraged the use of) the system the way Microsoft built it, let’s be honest, the only person at fault here is Microsoft. Microsoft provided this billing method and made it increasingly easy to use up large amounts of tokens on a single premium request that could churn for hours, even days, while spawning dozens, even hundreds, of subagents,” one user wrote.
TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
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