‘What a joke’: Github Copilot’s new payment causes confusion among devs

The golden years of Microsoft’s Github Copilot seem to be over — for the little guy, at least. The company is changing its payment system from a fixed interest rate to a token-based system that has the ability to pay users at a higher rate. Big businesses may have their own water, but small companies and employees may wonder how they should balance their monthly budget.

Changes, that will be held on June 1it means that users will be charged according to the number of tokens they burn while working instead of a small fixed price based on requests.

Some developers with financial whiplash have taken to places like Reddit and X to complain about what – in many cases – seems like a huge price hike.

“What a joke,” another Redditor he recently wrotesaying that, although they currently only pay 29 dollars a month, the new price will increase their money by about 750 dollars a month. “This new method is too expensive. I’m fixing mine by banning it. At that price, it’s no longer cheap or efficient in any way.”

Someone the user was sent “WOW, I didn’t expect the new price range to be so ridiculous,” she shared a photo that appears to show their price has gone up from $50 to $3,000.

A very strong increase. However, some Copilot users have pushed back against this criticism – realizing that, if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be blowing a lot of tokens on a regular basis. The people who spend this much money are vibe-coders with no real development experience, the critics maintain.

“The big difference between some of us is working all day but not getting too old and then taking these pictures.” I find it hard to believe that it’s difficult to diversify the work,” wrote another user. “The only way it gets crazy like this is to ‘write the vibe’ with a lot of swell tones,” he added. “It’s cheap even for small outfits if it’s used as a tool, for every supporter.”

Others focus on the shocking financials behind the company’s previous model. “Holy how much money did the sponsor lose,” another Redditor he asked in a recent post.

That’s a good question.

The finances behind Copilot don’t always seem easy to understand, and the amount of money the company must have spent to finance the flight of its users is mysterious and hidden from the public.

While some have criticized the changes and others have criticized the claims, some sources on the Internet say that developers have good reason to be disappointed, since Microsoft has encouraged its chat users carelessly and now seems to be pulling the rug out from under them.

the people who used the system the way Microsoft designed it (and encouraged it to be used that way), honestly the only one who has a problem here is Microsoft.

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but did not hear back by press time.