‘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 coming to an end – at least for the little guy. 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. Larger companies may still have the strength to do it, but smaller businesses and employees may wonder how to balance the monthly budget.

The changes, which ones will take place on June 1means users are charged based on the number of tokens they burn through as they work, rather than a low flat rate based on requests.

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

“What a joke,” said one Redditor wrote recentlyclaiming that while they currently only pay about $29 per month, the new rate will increase their costs to almost $750 per month. “This new utility model is just ridiculously expensive. I’m adjusting mine by canceling. At that price, it’s no longer cost-effective or useful in any practical way.”

Another one user posted “WOW, I didn’t expect the new pricing model to be so ridiculous,” shared a screenshot that appeared to show their costs had increased from about $50 to about $3,000.

The increases sound extreme. However, some Copilot users have pushed back on this criticism, noting that if you know what you’re doing, you really shouldn’t be using so many tokens on a regular basis. The people spending so much are “vibe coders” with little actual development knowledge, these critics claim.

“The huge difference between some of us working all day and still barely running out of capacity and then these screenshots. I find it hard to believe it’s workload complexity differences,” one user wrote. “The only way it gets that crazy is if you do pure vibe coding with a bunch of bloated iterations,” they later added. “It’s quite affordable, even for small outfits, when used as a tool, from almost any provider.”

Others have focused on the mind-boggling economics behind the company’s previous model. “God damn, how much money did the co-pilot lose,” says one Redditor asked in a recent post.

It’s a good question.

The economics behind Copilot haven’t always seemed so easy to understand, and the amount of money the company must have spent to subsidize the ongoing vibe-coding escapades of its user base is similarly mysterious and hidden from the public.

While some have criticized the changes and others have criticized those, still other online voices have argued that developers have a prime reason to be angry, as Microsoft encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now appears to be pulling the rug out from under them.

“To all the people blaming… the people who actually used the system the way Microsoft built it (and even encouraged it to be used this way), honestly, Microsoft is the only one to blame. Microsoft provided this billing method and they kept making it easier and easier to burn huge numbers of tokens on single premium requests that could run 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 at time of publication.