'You're kidding': GitHub Copilot's new token-based charging sparks consternation among developers

The golden age of Microsoft GitHub seems 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-based system that has the potential to charge users at a significantly higher rate. Large companies may still have the means to do this, but small businesses and workers might wonder how they're supposed to balance the monthly budget.

The changes, which take effect June 1, mean users will be charged based on the number of tokens they burn while working, instead of a low flat rate based on requests.

Some financially struggling developers have taken to places like Reddit and X to lament what - in many cases - appears to be a drastic increase in costs.

"What a joke," one Reddit user recently wrote, saying that although they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will increase their costs to almost $750 per month. "This new usage model is just stupidly expensive. I'm adjusting mine by canceling. At this price, it's no longer profitable or useful in a practical way."

Another user posted, "WOW, I didn't expect the new pricing model to be this ridiculous," sharing a screenshot that appears to show their costs have gone from around $50 to around $3,000.

The increases seem extreme. However, some Copilot users have responded to this criticism, noting that if you know what you're doing, you really shouldn't spend so many tokens on a regular basis. The people who spend so much are mood coders with little real development knowledge, these critics argue.

"The big difference between some of us who work all day and barely have any surplus, then these screenshots. I find it hard to believe these are differences in workload complexity," one user wrote. "The only way it gets crazy is if you just do 'vibrational coding' with a ton of bloated iterations," they later added. “It's quite affordable, even for small businesses, if used as a tool, from virtually any vendor.”

Others focused on the mind-boggling economics of the company's previous model. “How much fucking money did the co-pilot lose,” one Reddit user asked in a recent post.

That's a good question.

The economics behind Copilot haven't always seemed so easy to understand, and just as mysterious and hidden from public view is the amount the company has had to spend to subsidize the mood-coding escapades of its user base.

While some have criticized the changes and others have criticized the changes, other voices online have argued that developers have very good reason to be upset, given that Microsoft has encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now appears to be pulling the rug out from under them.

"To all the blamers...those who actually used the system the way Microsoft built it (and even encouraged its use that way), honestly the only one to blame here is Microsoft. Microsoft provided this billing method and they continued to make it easier and easier to burn massive numbers of tokens on single premium requests that could last for hours or even days while spawning dozens or even hundreds of subagents," one user wrote.

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment but did not receive a response at the time of publication.