This is happening with GitHub because they resell other models, right? Including ChatGPT and Claude.
This hasn’t happened with the models directly on their platforms yet for the plans that still offer flat rates. Right?
At my company, all of us devs have GitHub copilot enterprise licenses, which was $39/month for basically unlimited use on most models. The new pricing is the same price except we get 3900 copilot credits a month. 1 credit is 1000 tokens. There is nothing concrete about how many tokens are used, but they estimate powerful models like Claude will use about 10 credits per transaction. The more basic models are less consumption, but still count. Code completion is still unlimited. It’s going to get really expensive really fast for companies balls deep in it.
For token context, we had someone come in and give us an hour long vibe coding lesson with Claude code.he created a basic 600 line app in that hour and consumed 40000 tokens. I have UI tests with twice as many lines of code. It’s going to be a blood bath, and I’m here for it.
Yesterday I had a meeting where I explained this to my team. Nobody can use Opus anymore and shoot for under 5% of your monthly budget per work day. They better pray that I am the first one to run out of credits, I won’t buy more until that. From today alone it looks grim, they changed something in the harness too, making it burn credits. I would say we use it very lightly and we are in trouble. It is going to be a blood bath. Does anyone know if the JetBrains plan is more token efficient? I am also looking at just paying API cost for a cheap model on openrouter.
We don’t have any power users so I think we’re going to be fine for now. I do believe that by default all of your company credits are pooled, so one person could use everyone’s in theory. I thought I read that can be changed.
I’ve asked 3 questions to Claude today because I was struggling with an error. I’m curious to see how many credits I used to end up not using any of the generated code.
I change it to not be pooled. I am not going to used them conservatively for someone else to blow the entire plan on me.
Why would anyone use Copilot when you have so many other options. Cursor just released Composer 2.5 and it’s actually decent. I should have a job right now doing this.
From the enterprise admin of Copilot, Cursor & Claude…enterprise controls.
MicrosoftGitHub understands what companies need to run their products securely and successfully (at scale™)./edit to add. Our Copilot bill went down due to change in billing type, mostly due to organization pooling of credits.
That just sounds like bad management, and a huge opportunity to cut costs by switching to Linux and something like cursor or other alternatives.
I don’t think you understood my sentence, we (the company) already offer plenty of choices. In fact we offer OpenAI (Codex, ChatGPT) as well as Gemini. I just admin Cursor, Copilot and Claude (and at one time we offered Windsurf, but that didn’t have enough users to rectify the costs/time spent administrating it). What I am trying to tell you is that the fairly new companies, OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic/Claude absolutely suck at making their product usable by the enterprise while Gemini and Copilot completely understand enterprise needs/requirements.
We already have Linux laptops (with enterprise controls). /edit Apple machines are primarily used though. We even offer Windoze if you really need it! (Some folks do.)
That’s fair, as long as it’s recognized that it’s that way for now, and rapidly changing.
Push Chinese models. Deepseek, kimi, qwen etc.
No datacenters locally and local oligarchs won’t have that much power over us. They won’t be lobbying that much against humans if local oligarchs can’t make money
Yeah, empower chinese models, instead! That’s the solution!
You are not empowering them if you run them locally
Doubt.
The slop is now prohibitively expensive. Good.
Every single person who mentions using AI for anything- any reason at all- all I can do is imagine what face they would make if I spat in it.
Said like someone who doesn’t understand that AI is a tool that can greatly improve your work life and productivity.
If I was you I’d do some research into it, especially around GitHub copilot, and get learning - or you’re going to be left behind. If you’re a dev then you are signing your careers death warrant by having that attitude.
I’m sorry, did everybody else not see this coming from miles away? This is the private equity playbook.
- Make a service so cheap as to seem to good to be true to attract customers.
- Gain a loyal base of people
- once theyre locked in, squeeze them for all they’re worth.
When something is too good to be true, you ALWAYS have to be ready to either jump ship, massively change how you do things, or pay through the nose.
The unique thing about GitHub Copilot (and all the other vibe-coding tools) is that they’re speed-running the playbook because this shit is not profitable. It can’t be. Their costs scale up with usage, unlike every other business that can take advantage of economies of scale, so they’ve skipped the slow, steady enshittification phase and jumped directly into the “squeeze blood from this stone to keep the scam going a little longer” phase.
Plain inference is profitable actually, that’s why there are a hundred inference providers on OpenRouter who compete by undercutting each other. The labs however aren’t profitable because training the models is a huge drain.
As others have pointed out, the compute cost of inference is only one small part of the puzzle. All the frontier model providers - which OpenRouter gives you access to - are massively raising their prices in desperate bids to recoup the cost of model generation in the first place.
There’s really no hiding from the token apocalypse unless you’re running a model on your own hardware.
