‘What a joke’: Github Copilot’s new token-based billing spurs consternation among devs

The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be at an end — for the little guy, at least. The company is switching its billing system from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system that has the potential to bill users at a significantly higher rate. Bigger enterprises may still have the juice for it, but smaller companies and workers could find themselves wondering how they’re supposed to balance the monthly budget.

The changes, which will take place June 1, mean that users will charged based on how many tokens they burn through as they work instead of a low flat rate based on requests.

Some developers with financial whiplash have taken to places like Reddit and X to bemoan what — in many cases — appears to be a drastic escalation in cost.

“What a joke,” one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month. “This new usage model is just stupidly expensive. I’m adjusting mine by cancelling. At that cost, it is no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical way.”

Another user posted “WOW, didn’t expect new pricing model to be this ridiculous,” sharing a screenshot that appeared to show that their costs had shot up from around $50 to some $3,000.

The increases sound extreme. However, some Copilot users have bitten back at this criticism — noting that, if you know what you’re doing, you really shouldn’t be blowing through quite so many tokens on a regular basis. The people spending this much are vibe-coders with little actual development knowledge, those critics maintain.

“The vast difference between some of us working all day and still barely having overage and then these screenshots. I struggle to believe it’s complexity differences in the workload,” wrote one user. “The only way it gets crazy like that is if you are purely ‘vibe coding’ with a ton of bloated iterations,” they later added. “It’s pretty affordable for even small outfits if used as a tool, on pretty much any provider.”

Others have focused on the mind-boggling economics behind the company’s previous model. “Holy fuck how much money was copilot losing,” one Redditor asked in a recent post.

It’s a good question.

The economics behind Copilot have not always seemed so easy to grasp, and the amount that the company must have spent to subsidize the ongoing vibe-coding escapades of its user base is similarly mysterious and hidden from public view.

While some have criticized the changes and others have critiqued those critiques, still other online voices have argued that developers have a perfectly good reason to be upset, given that Microsoft encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now appear to be pulling the rug out from under them.

“To all the people blaming…the people who actually used the system the way that Microsoft built it (and even encouraged it to be used this way), honestly the only one at fault here is Microsoft. Microsoft provided this billing method and they kept making it easier and easier to burn through massive numbers of tokens on single premium requests that could churn for hours or even days while spawning dozens or even hundreds of sub-agents,” one user wrote.

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but did not hear back by publication time.