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GitHub Copilot AI Credits Are Unfair, Expensive, and Killing Real Development Workflows #198015
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your point is like 30% valid to be quite frank. while yes, you can't expect 100% uptime on an agent for an entire month, just like renting a car, the framing is completely wrong. a more apt comparison is as follows: I rent a car for a day and it lasts me about 4 hours before i have to charge it, so i rented the a more expensive car from a different rental company and it only lasted me 20 seconds before i had to recharge it. the problem isn't that people think it will last all month, the problem is that it FAR undercuts your payments. When I could pay for 2 separate claude pro subscriptions and get roughly 10x more usage for the exact same price as copilot pro+, then copilot pro+ is simply put a complete scam. i am not exaggerating when i tell you this, i was working on Opus 4.8 and was able to have 100% uptime for 3.5 hours straight without hitting my 5 hour limit. Conversely, I was using Copilot for the exact same project and I used 10% of my MONTHLY LIMIT in the span of an hour. That's not an timeframe expectation difference, that's just simply a business model difference. copilot has an insane amount of unnecessary waste when it comes to tokens when you compare it to claude or other models, and they're charging us for all of it. they either need to 1) increase the AI credits we get, or 2) make the models not just throw away millions of tokens when asked to scan 1000 lines of code when claude does the exact same thing with under 50k |
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I immediately switch to Anthropic Claude (from $20/month => $100/month then $200/month), very worth it. |
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I just cancelled GITHUB Copilot since they made it super expensive. Just use the other companies. |
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Congratulations to the GitHub product team! You finally solved the mystery of how to clear out the traffic. Too much code for too less, maybe too many requests for only 10$.. who knows?! I had to get something else in order to keep up with work. The only reason I am still paying for Copilot is that I was hoping it was all a BIG MISTAKE and someone would roll back. I've been with copilot ever since they rolled it out, and now .... now idk if waiting is worth 10$. |
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Yup - canceled copilot - what a joke - this is getting silly - we might move to host our our git server to- its just not cost effective for business teams anymore .. and the price of actions now per this mystery credit???? Its not even AI related- WOW. I am sure in the end many will just deal with the cost ... and others will leave - it will all work out - but definitely we will move our cloud stack to another cloud provider as we can see other places where they will change pricing to boost the stock. People have to make money - but adding this cost and not reducing the seat price at the same time is just bad. Put it this way - they are becoming jerks ... nothing against the people of the company - just the companies treatment of their customers will likely continue to hurt their brand. |
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We no longer are able to choose a free agent after using our credits. It used to select one automatically if you chose. This has gotten to be outrageous |
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They will never see me again until they change their plans again |
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I use VSCode and I honestly think this is a huge failure of the VSCode's implementation of Agent mode. GHCopilot has to change their billing because a horribly implemented Agent mode is likely costing them fountains of money. I'll say this at the top for others: remove the I ran out of credits so I added a Gemini API Key and enabled Logging to see the input that Copilot was passing to the API. In Agent mode there is a totally impressive waste of input tokens that drives up the cost to use the model. Input tokens are cheap, often a quarter or less the price of an Output token. However, this fact is irrelevant when VSCode spams the Input with useless tokens. From my tests, on average and depending on the chosen model, the Input tokens per request is roughly 60x the amount of output tokens per request. This was under a relatively simple task. The problem is the agents' carefree use of tools spamming and filling up the input tokens with every useless file the agent decides to crawl, even if you've given the agent all files it should need to perform the task. With every tool call, a new request is made to the API repeating the giant system prompt once again.. For example, a frontier model such as Gemini 3.5 Flash, given a simple task and roughly 3,000 token starting prompt was quickly rate limited after accrewing 2.4 million input tokens after only two minutes. In the same time, the model outputted 40,000 Output tokens. By the tenth tool call the model made, each request made to the API was roughly 200,000 input tokens. Using a more capable model means fewer wasted tools but a higher cost. VSCode team simply needs to think about how they utilize Input tokens and how models actually interact with tools. |
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I completely agree with this and really hope GitHub listens to the feedback from the community. |
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Sigh, you're all wrong. This is a business decision. Just look at the community feedback to see that—there won't be any more subsidies, and they won't come back. |
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Well then their users will not come back either. That is like what? A more than 500% increase in "usage" cost! If that isn't a bug, it is completely insane! |
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Previously, every time you used it, they were losing money. My personal guess is that their business decision was to cut losses and make a profit, which would inevitably require them to be more expensive than the original computing power providers to be profitable. Next, based on feedback, they'll decide whether to continue subsidies or maintain the current system. Unlike Codex, they won't reset the quota. Just look at those webinars; they spend almost a month discussing them. This traditional research model is really terrible. Switch to other providers and models as soon as possible. Don't let this delay your work plans. If all else fails, go back to traditional programming methods. |
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If the purpose of GH is Cut losses and make a profit the formula proposed for end users unmanteinable. I've been working with different providers (including as dev, so I'm aware about costs) and they make profit but on a fair price. Everyone wons. Lets wait if GH could do something and avoids loosing clients (including me). |
The problem is that Claude is 50% cheaper and allows way more overall usage. I was able to use Opus 4.8 for 3 hours straight and got 10% of my WEEKLY limit. Similarly, I used copilot for an hour and am already at 10% of my MONTHLY usage. The usage based billing is fine, but not when the models you host waste millions of tokens for absolutely no reason. Me asking it to look at 1000 lines of code for bugs should not have 1m cached tokens and use 100k tokens. |
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I completely agree with @KarimWajihKMW. I find myself constantly checking my billing settings page https://github.com/settings/billing/ai_usage just to monitor usage and figure out how the system calculates it. Hopefully, GitHub improves this very soon. |
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i am personally switching all my tools over to use my msdn credits on foundry |
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We have provided more details and a FAQ about usage-based billing in this discussion, which may be updated if new information becomes available. To keep conversations all in one place and to ensure you receive timely updates, we’ll be closing this post and recommend you comment on or subscribe to the discussion linked above. |
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Sounds like they are really listening. |
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sams for. me , some how 52% of my monthly tokens are used justed in one day (2 of july 2026) ,while it used to fit for the whole month, i am very disappointed and actively searching for alternatives. |
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we burned 65000 tokens in 5 days with only 3 team members actively using it our of 15 as most of our staff was away for a conference |
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the cost centers also arent correctly attributing credits so other teams are wiping out our tokens |
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Same, even I have dropped the individual plan and even at my office i have told that we need to move, this is killing productivity, even $70 is worse than claude code $20 plan, and claude code was in it self less. This is really frustrating as a user, subpar vibe coding experinace (when compared to codex or claude or even open code) and credits vanish like anything. |
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I moved to codex, cool pilot is useless with this pricing |
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I recently changed to codex and I was sceptical, but codex is awesome! Plus plan for me is lasting forever.. By the time my weekly quota gets to 30% its reset time.. I'm using mini model mostly but nonstop... |
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The primary issue for me using this via vscode is that its not even using (on auto mode) the better AI and even if it was im paying for its mistakes. At this price and pace i am burning through my tokens too fast to be of value or use. Mostly spinning fixing its mistakes. This is not a useful product, I am switching to other vendors. 1/1000th of my tokens for running a script One day resulted in 30% token use, it results in anxiety in using AI. As others said, before i ask to perform a task i have no idea what the cost will be or if i can complete a task in budget. Given the AI generates quite unreadable code in many cases, or code that needs AI to fix due to its sloppy design or volumous generation - its no longer valuable to me at these prices. |
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Very worst pricing plans |
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I think the community needs two things very clearly from GitHub Copilot's new AI Credits model: 1. Credit Preview Before Execution Before any prompt is executed, users should be able to see an estimated credit/token cost. Similar to how cloud providers show estimated costs before running resources, Copilot should display a credit preview so developers can make informed decisions before consuming credits. 2. Fair Credit Refunds for Unsuccessful Agentic Tasks If an agentic task does not achieve the requested outcome and the user ultimately reverts or discards all generated changes, there should be a mechanism to refund credits or provide credit compensation. Users should not be charged the full cost when the generated result is unusable and requires complete rollback. The current model lacks transparency and puts too much risk on the user. Better cost visibility and a fair refund policy would significantly improve trust in Copilot and encourage adoption of advanced features. Jitendra Pal | Principal QA |
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I agree with this comment. I understand needing to re-coupe costs because this endeavor into agentic is expensive and currently financially risky for all involved, but the pricing model on credits does not feel competitively priced to market share. Given how immature the product is, to be forced into a premium has instantly made my team look to alternatives. I applaud the overall effort of the co-pilot engineers -- the pricing model is clearly coming from on high -- but the business model at this point is very risky. Credit Preview Before Execution - Yes, and to add to this, how do custom agents, sub-agents, skills, memory, codebase scanning, indexing et al: how are those factored into the product? How does my team control costs in the real world? This discussion: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/197089 - is inadequate to be fiscally viable or to have any realistic audit trail that I can financially justify our spend with. Any type of preflight confidence score would be a smart path forward. I would rather spend a penny, knowing that this would cost me $300 dollars to execute a feature: then execute it in the blind. IE: how am I to give guidance to my team, or my leadership on how to budget? Blank check to Github? Anyone think I'll get that approved as a line item in my 2027 budget? Reserved Credits - Much like everything else in the cloud, I feel that for businesses to budget a reservation pricing model makes sense. For this type of premium, I want a volume discount. This pricing is not FinOps friendly, it is a bottomless pit. Fair Credit Refunds for Unsuccessful Agentic Tasks - Exactly what I was thinking. It is hard to quantify exactly how bad AI can get, because hallucination is still a serious front-line problem. In general my team throws away about 50% of code suggestions as instructions, skills, agents, prompt engineering etc are ignored by the model. I've even had multiple models tell me that eventually they fall back to their training and ignore instructions. Do I still get charged if I press stop, because I've realized the model is reasoning itself into oblivion, or that it has the wrong supposition no matter how clear I believe I am writing? Bottom line: caveat emptor. Understood. Given that generative code still has serious flaws, the guidance to my team is simple: go back to basics. This pricing model is too risky and does not scale. Use AI for help, use your brain and your training. Think small, execute small. Limit the blast radius of decisions. Stop vibe coding. Use generators that are reliable. Get to know the models better. RTFM. Keep code snippets so you can re-use work. Keep a knowledge base. I want to add one more thing in here - because I have been at keyboards since the 1980s, what co-pilot did for me was help with me arthritis and other long term repetitive task problems that have cropped up for me in the last ten years. I relied on co-pilot to help me write code that I could review as these massive sessions of keying in code for hours on end are now physically difficult to perform. Now, that is not financially viable and my disappointment is that the assistant that helped me feel less literal pain in my day is a liability. I'l persevere -- this is not woe is me -- but for others who also rely on accommodations to do their jobs, this pricing model places anyone with a physical disability at a disadvantage. |
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Ha ha, would love to see the stats on if they refund us for all failed / prompts that did the wrong thing or broke something... That task cost you $500, however to achieve your goal we had to run 200 sub prompts and 50 sub agents all of which had their own auto generated sub prompts process's to achieve your task, and you had to steer and re-prompt to achieve that task an addition 50 times, here's a refund for $499.95 lol... I'm not sure it's all down to MS, all they do is make git hub worse and modify vscode and copilot extension, here's the prices on openrouter: https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m3 ($0.30 / $1.20per 1M -- 50% off at the moment, their servers are overloaded) https://openrouter.ai/openai/gpt-5.3-codex ($1.75 / $14per 1M) https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview ($2 / $12per 1M) etc..... In the search for an alternate solution I've purchased deepseek v4 pro api key, minimax m3 api key, already had GLM 5.1 and today $10 on openrouter credits which offer access to countless models. I made 1 query to deepseek v4 pro and it cost me $0.15 (I asked what's your model name)... If I ran that same query using the deepseek api key from deepseek directly it would be closer to $0.001 They are all going to do us over in the end. But I've ported and modified reasonix cli tool which has great caching for deepseek over to pi.dev yesterday, so far its working out quite well, often >90% cache hit rate which saves a lot of credit money, just it's built for deepseek but seems to be working with minimax m3 also, so fingers crossed. |
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"https://openrouter.ai/minimax/minimax-m3 ($0.30 / $1.20per 1M -- 50% off at the moment, their servers are overloaded)" I haven't had any server overload issues with the minimax coding plan I currently have. I did however have issues with caching not working on the M3 model with Pi. I spent a long session doing some refactor work with the M3 model about half way through realizing that your cache optimizer was reporting 0 cache hits (Thanks for that BTW). Up until that point I had been using M2.7 so it was working nicely. Anyway apparently its a known bug. https://pi.dev/packages/pi-minimax-m3-caching-fix This extension will fix the issue until the actual bug is fixed upstream. Just in case you guys decide to switch to M3 plan and get scared because its eating tokens heavily. |
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Congratulations on launching one of the WORST plans ever. Thanks for helping us to make a decision on which platform we have to switch. 👎👎👎👎👎 |
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Very worst experience with these plans
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Subject: Re: [community/community] GitHub Copilot AI Credits Are Unfair, Expensive, and Killing Real Development Workflows (Discussion #198015)
I had a similar experience. I don't use copilot for heavy coding task on large repo. I use it for normal edits in bulk, scripting, automation etc.
With just 10$ flat fee I never had to pay more earlier. This month I consumed all my credits within few hours that too for a very light weight task.
I had to cancel my subscription and move to another solution.
Very disappointed by this change.
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I was skeptical of the all the nay slayers. I even upgraded to the MAX plan because I assumed having the 20k credits would be plenty. WOW was I wrong. I burned through it in a matter of HOURS. Yes, I use Opus 4.8 in XHigh and I can switch to lower models. But it seems like we're stuck choosing to spend more time on getting worse results vs getting better results quicker. I'll play around with other models and reasoning effort but so far...yikes. |
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Root cause is Microsoft's inability to make deal with Atrophic, and we customers pay that price. What Eventually what you get dear MS team, that majority of developers will go directly to suppliers and literally no once will use Copilot. |
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hehe, noobs |
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After the update my normal request burned through 85% of my tokens in few hours, like wtf i haven't been able to use what i paid for. I just cancelled the plan and prolly switch to something that's worth the money. |
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Uber was dirt cheap when it needed to hoard market share. With time passing, they needed to get profitable after the losses made to gain market. It is just how it goes, and Copilot isn't different. For a while we will be able to use other providers' agents for cheap, but eventually we will choose to either walk (fall back to manual programming) or be prepared to pay a lot for a taxi (pay 300$/month if not more in tokens). Another option is buying a car (hosting a local agent), knowing that with one's budget (for hardware and open source models) it won't be as comfortable as an Uber ride as you will also have to drive it yourself (host it). |
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Wow! Well articulated. |
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I think you missed the point. If providers like Anthropic increase cost, the multiplier for using Anthropic models via Copilot will remain (i.e. if Uber allowed drivers to set prices to $1 per trip and Uber added a x5 multiplier you'd pay $5, but then if drivers decided to increase prices to $3 that would be $10 increase at a total of $15 per trip). Appreciate your point that providers like Anthropic are subsidising costs to capture market share, which is totally true. Howet, just wanted to call out that it's not an exact comparison and there's more of a nuance with regards to how badly GitHub has royalty screwed their existing user base. Apologies, I'm pretty mad about it after receiving a ~$8k USD bill for June 🙃 |
This is ridiculous. I asked Copilot to just make a SMALL plan, but it started doing... I don't know how to call it
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It did not plan, but wrote the whole code itself |
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shiiiit i think that i only people that have this problem! |
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Cancelled my Copilot Max subscription. Burnt through my credits in 6 days, and by day 10 I'd blown $150 in additional usage. Even though the Claude models were the issue, I added a custom model, plugged in my Gemini API key and used Gemini 3.5 Flash, and it was still burning through $2 a query, so something must be internally wrong with Copilot. Mind you, on the same codebase 3 months ago I was using a Copilot Pro+ account and never hit any limit throughout the month. Decided to give Claude Code a try. Much better experience so far, and fair pricing compared to Copilot 
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so i think we must be switch to another agents |
Claude Code is likely the best option today which is kind of wild considering it was a comparably expensive option for the longest time. You can use Claude’s CLI along Visual Studio which is not ideal but I find it to be an quite OK experience as direct integration (so the agent can see your open file, marked code etc) is not that relevant today anymore as this „assistant like“ working mode is replaced by autonomous working agents anyhow. The truth is that there is unfortunately no (official) agent integration available for Visual Studio besides Copilot. If you absolutely need it I would recommend switching to Jetbrains Rider as it is much more widely supported if you want full IDE integration, for example for Claude. Alternatively, VSCode can be an option too of course but Rider is the much more complete IDE of course. Microsoft is killing their ecosystem anyhow so way not switch your IDE too while you’re at it. |
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There is now a VSCode extension for Claude Code. Works exactly like Copilot you don't need to rely on the CLI like the early days. |
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the challenge seems to be that the copilot agent harness is super inefficient with tokens, and even with a more efficient harness and just using the copilot keys, caching seems to be limited or completely not used. when testing with opencode or pi or Zed harness, no cache tokens are reported at all. when using the copilot harness with logging on, input tokens balloon with each new query. even cheap models burn through context window MUCH faster using the copilot harness than using other harnesses, but cache is something on the server side, not on the harness side, so that's 100% on Microsoft to sort through. Certainly people shouldn't expect tons of usage on a model like Opus 4.8, but when you can pay the listed per-token fees for using Opus on other servers (OpenRouter, OpenCode, Google Vertex from our tests) and Copilot is burning 10-20x the tokens, the problem is with the harness. Cheaper models like 3.1 Flash or Sonnet 4.6 are also using significantly more tokens than they do on any other harness. |
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I was and I am using VS Code, paid office family subscription, I was very loyal to VSCode, when most ran to Cursor/Antigravity/whatever, i was stick with VSCode + Copilot. Kinda same situation |
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Super expensive. They turned credit cost for models 10x easily. Now simple workflows ramp up the costs over $200 very quickly. All for naught. Not going to be sustainable and will definitely not going to tolerate this bs for much longer. While everyone switched ages ago, I wanted to give VSCode and github a chance and for a while it was ok. But the price gauging now is just predatory and will not become the norm any time soon. I won't play along. |
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i already forgot about vscode and copilot. switched to zed + codex/claude |
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I also canceled 40 GH Copilot business account and move to CC. I used GH Copilot one year and was the best option with the request charge model. Once they move to token it become too expensive compared with the usage in Team/Business/Pro suscriptions in CLaude Code, ChatGPT Codex, Cursor... hope they can come back soon. |
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I thought the whole purpose of them developing the MAI models was to provide a heavily subsidized developer service again to bring it back in line with pre-June GH Copilot usage, and boy was I wrong. I get the feeling that in order to . If they can create the perception that it is less expensive to use agents than an in-house development staff, they would then be free to reclaim those associated costs back into their model profits. Why do we accept tech companies that actively try and eliminate the very people that supported them all along the way? Prove me wrong. |
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I move to opencode not looking back |
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I'm not 100% sure how this is fair since I paid for 1 year at one agreed usage limit/price (premium requests aside, i could always use the lower tier models) and all of a sudden it's VERY limited in usage. cancelled my personal sub and will not be renewing my work yearly sub. It went from very useful to completely unreliable, unusable. |
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Copilot in GitHub
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I am very disappointed with the new GitHub Copilot AI Credits pricing model.
Since the June 1 update, Copilot has become unpredictable and much more expensive. Credits are consumed too quickly, especially when using agent mode, code review, debugging, or repository-related tasks.
The biggest problem is that users cannot clearly know how much a task will cost before running it. One task can burn a large amount of credits without enough warning or transparency.
This is unfair for developers, freelancers, and small businesses who trusted Copilot as an affordable coding assistant.
I used 100% of copilot pro+ in just 2 days of normal work which I used to do months and years ago.
GitHub should seriously reconsider this pricing model, increase the included credits, add clear cost warnings before each task, and give users better control over credit spending.
The current system makes Copilot feel risky to use instead of helpful.
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