The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot seems to be over — for the little guy, at least. The company is changing its billing system from a fixed subscription rate to a token usage system that has the ability to charge users a significantly higher rate. Larger businesses may still have the juice for it, but smaller companies and employees could be wondering how they’re supposed to balance the monthly budget.
The changes, which will take place on June 1stmeans users will be billed based on the number of tokens they consume as they work instead of a low flat fee based on requests.
Some cash-strapped developers have taken to places like Reddit and X to bemoan what – in many cases – appears to be a drastic cost escalation.
“What a joke,” one Redditor wrote recentlyclaiming that while they currently only pay about $29 a month, the new price will increase their costs to nearly $750 a month. “This new usage model is just stupidly expensive. I’m customizing mine by canceling. At this cost, it’s no longer economical or useful in any practical way.”
Other user posted “WOW, I didn’t expect the new pricing model to be so ridiculous,” sharing a screenshot that appeared to show their cost had increased from around $50 to around $3,000.
Amplifies the sound extreme. However, some Copilot users have responded to this criticism – noting that if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t really be blowing that many tokens on a regular basis. The people spending that much are vibe coders with little real development knowledge, these critics argue.
“The huge difference between some of us working all day and still not having a blast and then these screenshots. I find it hard to believe it’s workload complexity differences,” one user wrote. “The only way it gets crazy is if you’re purely ‘vibe coding’ with a ton of bloated repetitions,” they later added. “It’s quite affordable even for small outfits if used as a tool, on almost any provider.”
Others have focused on the impressive financials behind the company’s previous model. “Holy shit how much money was the co-pilot losing,” one Redditor he asked in a recent post.
It’s a good question.
The financials behind Copilot don’t always seem so easy to fathom, and how much the company must have spent subsidizing its user base’s continued vibe-coding escapades is equally mysterious and hidden from the public eye.
While some criticized the changes and others criticized those reviews, other online voices argued that developers have a very good reason to be upset, given that Microsoft encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now appears to be pulling the rug out from under it.
“To everyone who blames… the people who used the system the way Microsoft built it (and even encouraged it to be used that way), honestly the only one to blame here is Microsoft. Microsoft provided this billing method and continued to make it easier and easier and easier to log huge numbers of tokens into individual premium requests that could be shuffled for hours or even days while dozens or even dozens of users were creating hundreds of documents.
TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but had not heard back by press time.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
