It's a game of musical chairs and the music has stopped

Starting June 1, Copilot moves to token-based billing.

The biggest reason I paid for Copilot was simple pricing. Now we get credits, token tracking, and usage limits.

Maybe this is the future of AI tools.

Maybe it's just Microsoft being Microsoft.

How many of you plan to keep paying for Copilot after this change? 👀

Or are you moving to Cursor, Claude Code, Codex etc.?

Last month I used ~60% of my quota in an entire month.
This month I've already used 25% on day one.
What an amazing improvement.

this can't be real lmao. How long until they just revert back to the old credit system/ a more equitable one?

This is the only meaningful thing we can do as consumer

Tried a single Claude 4.6 prompt this morning on my personal GitHub Copilot Pro subscription... 3% gone. One prompt!

Best part? I didn't even use the code it generated because it wasn't usable...

At that rate, I'll spend more time watching my quota than writing code.

Time to move on...

Bon voyage.

For me, this became one of the best features of Github Copilot, where AI becomes the extension of your coding, not a replacement, but an extension... a tool. It gets you into the flow state, where you stop wasting time on typing everything and just (potentially) finish what you have started.

No prompts, just code.

So in essence, this is a tool for programmers, not vibe coders.

I never changed this setting away from the default engine, and it kept working just fine for everything that I do.

I extensively use both features: - Ghost text suggestions - Next edit suggestions

Then this mess with chat came along, with downgrade of Github Copilot to a free tier at the end of the subscription period, and I wonder if we are going to loose this? Are there any alternatives that cover both of the mentioned features?

Tbh, I'd pay some form of subscription just for this feature alone, without the chat capability.

For context why i think that

To build some of my complex project ideas which I know I could never be able to build along side my job so I used Copilot fotlr them.

For better or worse I used to only use single chat session for weeks and only create new chat when vscode extension host would literally crash due the really long conversation

I used like gpt 5.3 codex high for most task with literally really long prompt with all the edge cases and used the speech to text for it and it did exactly what I asked without thinking to much this was my workflow

Now today in the last long chat I just asked it to fix one bug and blew through 200 credits out of 7900 with one prompt

So inshort i was getting 1500 request for only 40 dollers and now i will only get almost ~80 or less equivalent requests

So GitHub was losing too much money subsidising power users that makes sence why they made this decision to switch to usage based.

One good thing which will come out off this will be I will start enjoying working on personal projects again I have forgotten how much I loved to write code.

Joined today just to watch the fallout, waiting for the first reports of orgs sleepwalking into token era bankruptcy with unlimited credit cards.

🍿

Excited to try the usage-bill system in my first-day! Thank you Microsoft, it's an amazing improvement of performance speed to reach the quota limit that I have to give a shot to try! What a breakthrough technology! I cannot wait for Day 2.... oh... I guess DeepSeek is calling me for interview job already? ["TO BE CONTINUED" meme music plays]

EOD update: we used our entire monthly allocation on day 1

😎

We laid off the testing guy, we laid off the security guy. The C-suite and marketing people have been instructed to use AI as much as possible.

A few weeks ago I asked for a CLI tool recommendation, and I was told to "use claude" as in, "why are you even bothering to manually run CLI commands?" and also, our company is so naiive they just call all AI "Claude" even though we're using GH copilot w/ claude models lol.

We've built some useful skills, plugin, and in general I think have automated a lot more than most teams have. We have set up what I think is pretty sophisticated orchestration across the entire org.

Welp,

I think we are going to sh*t a fricking brick at our copilot bill this month.

No one *seems* to care but me. I mentioned last week if we are going to do anything different after unlimited ends, and the senior guy's attitude was that they truly believe github copilot is going to roll out their own model and go back to unlimited "because they own their own compute", he said.

I'm employee <#10, and we have managed to hang on for FOUR years now, but I'm kind of shook at leadership's lack of care/concern for this situation.

Maybe we really don't care? Maybe these tokens we shall burn will propel our startup engines to acquisition and exit???

Check this out this is what token prices needs to be. Copilot and other llm providers open notebooks and take notes. and best thing is deepseek corrected mess created by 5.3 codex and even opus4.8.

PS: My codebase is 3.4 million lines and increasing. Dual kernel with Bridge and around 2 million lines of all documentation including ADR, PLAN, POC, RESEARCH OUTPUTS

The enshittification of Copilot is actually insane. I knew it was going to be bad, but not this bad. This is quite literally unusable, and that I should learn to code myself.

Like many of you, I got hit hard by GitHub Copilot's switch to usage-based billing (effective June 1). I burned through ~65% of my Pro+ quota in just 6 hours on the first day of the month.. I'm not a lead architect or senior Microsoft engineer who can write perfect prompts to save every token .. I'm just a regular individual developer trying to get work done.

I need a proper alternative that actually works for solo/independent devs..

I've looked into Cursor,OpenAI Codex,Claude Code..

but I want to hear from people who actually use them daily as individuals, not just hype or enterprise reviews..

It's too expensive for me. In just one day, I used 4,000 /20,000 credits, which means I would end up paying $600 a month.

Before the pricing change, my plan would cover the whole month without paying extra; After the change, I burnt 1/3 of the monthly credit already in one day. Yea I know the old unlimited requests was too good to have, and the new pricing matches with claude and openAI pricing, but it pretty much lost all it's competing advantage, it does not have API support like others, it can not process multimedia like others, and it does not have superior native agents like others. I can see github copilot will slowly lose all it's users if they don't make some change.

With 7000 AI credit of github copilot , i”ll cancel pro+ cuz just use for 1 DAY will burn it all .

I”ll use another way , cursor or anything . I love gh copilot but this time feel too bad ! 404

#github

I’ve been paying for Copilot Pro because it used to be genuinely useful.

It was one of those developer subscriptions that actually made sense. I could use it for refactors, small edits, navigating a codebase, cleaning up variables, asking it to adjust existing files, and it felt like a reliable monthly tool.

After the move to AI credits, the product feels completely different.

Disclosure: this post is based on what I’m seeing in my own Copilot usage dashboard and screenshots. I’m not claiming this is definitely a billing bug. It could be intended pricing, a metering change, Codex 5.3 medium being more expensive than expected, project context overhead, semantic indexing overhead, or some combination of those. The point is that the resulting usage feels wildly disproportionate and very poorly explained.

Today is June 1st. My monthly cycle literally just started. I made around 8 requests using Codex 5.3 medium, and Copilot is already showing about 43% of my monthly credits used.

That is insane for a subscription product.

These were not “build me a full SaaS app” prompts. I was not asking it to generate thousands of lines of code from scratch. I was not running massive architecture reviews or huge repo-wide rewrites.

It was normal development work inside an existing project: changing some variables, refactoring parts of the codebase, and making targeted adjustments. Copilot had the project tree available, and the Codebase Semantic Index was marked as ready.

The comparison with my previous usage is what makes this feel so wrong.

In May, I used Copilot in basically the same way, and the daily metered amounts were much lower. I had full days showing gross amounts like $0.03, $0.92, $1.72, $2.18, etc.

Now, on June 1st alone, my metered usage shows $5.66.

One day.

A handful of normal coding requests.

Almost half of my monthly credits gone.

At that point, this stops feeling like a predictable monthly subscription and starts feeling like a hidden meter attached to my IDE.

I understand that AI inference costs money. Larger context windows, agentic workflows, and codebase-aware tools are obviously more expensive than a simple autocomplete. The issue is that the user experience gives me almost no useful predictability.

A developer tool should not make you wonder whether a small refactor is going to use 2% of your monthly credits, 10%, or almost half your month.

For comparison, I tried a similar kind of request in regular Codex through ChatGPT Plus. After that request, it still showed around 96% remaining on the 5-hour limit and 99% remaining on the weekly limit.

That comparison is not perfect, since the products and billing models are different. I’m including it only because the workflow felt similar from a developer perspective, while the Copilot credit impact felt dramatically higher.

Copilot Pro still presents itself like a monthly subscription, but now behaves like a metered pay-per-use product where the user has no clear estimate before running a request.

If Copilot is going to be credit-based, users need better visibility before and after each request. Show a real estimate before the task runs. Show what part of the repo is being included. Show when project context, semantic indexing, or agentic steps are increasing the cost. Show a per-request breakdown that developers can actually understand.

Right now the experience feels like:

Pay monthly, but be careful, because a few normal coding requests might burn through your plan.

That is a terrible experience for a developer subscription.

I used to recommend Copilot Pro. It helped a lot. Now I’m seriously considering dropping it for agentic coding work and using regular Codex instead. Copilot may still be useful for autocomplete, but for project-level work this new credit system feels expensive, opaque, and stressful to use.

Has anyone else seen this kind of credit usage spike after the AI credits change?

If this turns out to be a billing bug or a misunderstanding on my side, I’ll update the post and mark it as solved.

Will you guys go back to code manually instead of letting a glorified copy machine do your work?

I miss the days in April when I could do everything on Opus for 3x.

If today's update is already a kick in the teeth for most of us.
You can't even spend tokens properly anymore.

Every time I send a prompt to Sonnet 4.6, asking for 4 or 5 small changes (change a button's design, fix a click action that isn't working correctly, correct a modal's positioning, etc.), simple things (to spend tokens), Sonnet does 2 things and blatantly ignores the rest.

I tell it to do what it didn't do. It thinks for a very long time (with medium thinking) and ignores tasks again.

I spend a while repeating the same thing I said in the original prompt (wasting input tokens), and after a while, it STILL ignores things.

Not only is Copilot unusable because of the pricing, but on top of that I don't know what they've touched but Sonnet's quality is now disgusting.