“Even though I was super cautious on the first day, trying it out with a limited number of uses, it still consumed 840 credits,” one user wrote of testing Claude Sonnet 4.6 through Copilot today. “I haven’t even done any really complex work yet,” another user complained after reported usage representing 21 percent of their monthly Pro Copilot subscription’s credit allotment in a single day. “I have a feeling I’ll be going somewhere else pretty soon.”
Amid the pricing change, plenty of GitHub Copilot users are predictably and publicly threatening to cancel their subscriptions or looking for other AI coding options. But others say they have been able to adjust to the new world of usage-based pricing. Coder Henri Kinnunen writes that they only burned 161 credits in a “productive day” of using GPT 5.3-Codex through Copilot, thanks to limiting themselves to “very focused and deliberate changes with AI.” Over on Bluesky, coder Neil Hewitt wisely noted that continuing a three-day-old chat session on Copilot probably isn’t as wise now, since it means sending “the entire chat history as context every time… hey, input tokens use credits… it’s not rocket science.”
While some Copilot users are jumping ship for other services with more generous usage limits, that kind of subsidized customer acquisition may soon give way to Copilot-style usage-based pricing across the industry. If that happens, LLMs that are more efficient with their tokens may win the economic battle; on Reddit, one user is already discussing how they’ve integrated Deepseek into their GitHub VSCode environment at a cost of only “about 7 cents for 15 million tokens.” While you might say “you get what you pay for,” some AI users are now contemplating a world where they also have to pay for what they get.
