I love how corpos can just change the rules at will.
Edit: New prices:
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/copilot-billing/models-and-pricing
And if you look at the old pricing structure, some of the models are increasing by 27x
Users on annual Pro or Pro+ plans will remain on their existing plan with premium request-based pricing until their plan expires, however, model multipliers will increase on June 1 (see table).
holy shit, 9x the previous cost. which was already not great. I was on the fence about cancelling it, but thanks for making up my mind, MS
I love that their email made it sound like it was a wash, like “we’re just changing our billing model, you’ll get credits now, samesies!” but then this pricing chart buried 3-levels down from the announcement lays out just how much less you’re going to get for the same price.
I wonder about all the startups who were bragging about their $10k/month AI coding bills being the best money they ever spent. When this new pricing kicks in and pushes it to $40k/month right around the time all the vibe-coded shit blows up their codebase, I wonder if they’ll still be so happy with their choices.
I interviewed for a place a while back and started asking about quality and velocity and how they balance it with AI developer tools, he said something like “One of our developers closed 400 PRs last month” and I instantly knew it was definitely not the place for me.
I wonder about all the startups who were bragging about their $10k/month AI coding bills being the best money they ever spent.
WTF did they think was going to happen?
So, did they use AI tools to type “LGTM” 400 times or nah?
But yeah, I also find that frustrating. Management just looks at terrible metrics like PRs closed or lines of code produced.
It’s not even novel that you can produce terrible code very quickly. Decades ago, our industry learned that it isn’t worth it, because you suffer for it later. Now the game is altered slightly and management demands that we throw all these learnings out the window.
They should really describe this as you’re on the same plan, but your plan gives you 80-88% less use.
This is the right way to go. This will incentivize many companies to rethink their strategy, and slow down or scale down AI adoption. After that and the revenue drops for many AI companies, they will back off purchasing all possible RAM and storage in existence which will drive down pricing. And when the prices get to normal again, we will simply buy more RAM for our local machines and run free models.
This news kinda makes me happy. Shit’s starting to fall apart. Finally.
So, if you subscribe to the $10/ month plan you get $10 worth of tokens to use within a month, and if you subscribe to the $49/month plan you get $49 worth of tokens to use within a month.
At this point why subscribe? Just pay directly the tokens so if you use less you pay less.
To me it doesn’t make sense to subscribe at $49 and maybe use $30 of tokens.
People were subscribing at the $49 plan because they were using $1000 in tokens worth
People were subscribing at the $49 plan because they were using $1000 in tokens worth
Companies were just eating that $951/mo loss so they could gain market share by burning their nearly endless pile of capital.
Now were on the cusp of the bubble bursting so the dominant players are now trying to extract revenue via rapid enshittification.
It’s not price fixing, that would be illegal, it just so happens that they’re all changing their business model at the same time. If they were doing illegal things there would be an investigation.
In completely unrelated news, didn’t you see the nice ballroom plans?
👉 💥 💥 GET DOWN DID SOMEONE SAY BALLROOM
How else are they going to begin to recap their billions and billions of debt? Someone has to pay for all those data centres, all that hardware, all that power, etc etc etc. It will be the companies that have come to rely on AI.
Sure, for now, AI is a lot cheaper than an intern, but it doesn’t become an expert like a human does. And Amazon used to be cheaper than other retailers right up until they had achieved vast market share.
This cannot be the last 10x price multiplier they pull. Not even close. Firstly they’re way, way, way off from recouping their costs, and secondly, they’re still way, way off market value for an incompetent human intern who isn’t learning much.
Uber didn’t enter the market to open up taxis to new drivers and bring down prices, that was marketing. They entered the market to take a cut out of ever taxi fare in the world, and drive up prices at peak times to many times the agreed fares, especially in regulated areas.
Similarly, AI didn’t enter the coding market to drive down prices and enable greater access for folk to generate code. They entered the coding market to receive the wages of programmers and drive up prices in in-demand fields. They are not unaware of how much companies pay devs. Why else would they have spent all those billions in advance? Where is the payback coming from?
Interesting.
Inline completions are genuinely useful, I’m mostly replacing them with local models though. They are slower but free as in beer (once you pay the hardware cost).
I’m interested in setting it up, are you using vs code? Which extension or editor?
I’m using vim with minuet-ai, and it plugs the AI suggestion into my completion module. I found the Copilot style virtual text interfaces all janky.
I tried AI auto-complete for maybe 6 months. I found that mistakes and hard to find bugs increased, actually lowering my productivity. I find that actually just typing everything (well, with traditional LSP) gives me more time to think about my code, the architecture, etc while I’m typing, leading to better results. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
Man, they couldn’t have communicated this more confusingly, if they tried.
That was intentional. They were trying to word the announcement to not make it sound like you’re now getting 1/5-1/9 as much AI for the same price.
Yeah, I imagine that they did try. But it’s not just the intentionally misleading announcement post, they also have 5(?) different subscription tiers, which get different changes from this. And one of the subscription tiers is actually called “Pro+”, so that does not mean “Pro and more expensive tiers” like I wondered. And they have this ridiculous intermediate currency to make things even more confusing.
Their offering itself is overly complex and confusing…
The whole “AI Credit” thing did strike me as odd to even introduce. They mention a few times that 1 AI Credit = $0.01, but then do the whole pricing table in $/1M tokens.
The only place I saw them even use “AI Credits” as a unit was to say the $10/month plan includes 1000 AI Credits. Why even introduce a whole new unit if you only use it to say your $10 monthly plan includes $10 of usage?
I suspect the answer is so that they can later muddy the waters by changing the number of included credits to be less than you’re paying monthly without directly saying “you’re now paying $20/month for $10 of usage”
I guess it is coming from the same people who came up with the world’s most inscrutable billing scheme for compute…
I mean, even then, they could increase the price per token, if they want to hand out fewer tokens for the price paid.
They could make this work like a prepaid SIM card, where you charge it with e.g. $10 and then you can use it until the $10 are used up.
Instead, they make it work like in-game currencies in scammy free-to-play games. Except that they didn’t choose a confusing conversion rate, for some reason…
All 0 multiplier gone from pricing.
And nothing of value was lost.
I could be really cruel right now, I could point out to people how this is chickens coming home to roost, how it’s always been grossly subsidized and underpriced, how the game was always getting users, companies, the country, the whole damn world hooked on these slop machines and then once they’re reliant on them to jack up the price hugely. I could be really mean about this, I could lord it over people, I could point out how they’ve been dupes this whole time and in the process traitors to all of humanity.
I could. i think I will.
New meme dropping: “telling you I told you so? Yes, I think I will”
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I literally just signed up for the $10/month plan… Guess ill just run my own git server.
Git? Forgejo is really nice.
Im just familiar with git.
Gotcha, ill give it a go. Thanks
What does having a git server have to do with copilot subscriptions?
Moving local to not support githib, I run Open Claw local too
what does github copilot do? ELI20ish
Mostly hallucinate and tell you you’re absolutely right
It will suggest code completions while programming, can ask answer questions about code, and can edit and run code if asked.
“AI Credit”
fuck !!!
