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

The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot seems to be over – for the little guy, at least. The company is changing its payment system from a low subscription rate to a token-based system with the ability to charge users a higher rate. Big businesses still have their juice, but small companies and employees may find themselves wondering how to balance their monthly budget.

The changes, which will take place on June 1, mean that users will be charged based on how many tokens they burn as they work instead of a 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 – seems like a huge cost increase.

“What a joke,” one Redditor recently wrote, saying that, although they currently pay about $29 a month, the new rate will increase their costs to about $750 a month. “This new utility model is ridiculously expensive. I fix mine by canceling. At that cost, it’s no longer cheap or useful in any tangible way.”

One user posted “WOW, didn’t expect the new pricing model to be this ridiculous,” sharing a screenshot that appears to show their cost has gone up from about $50 to $3,000.

The rise feels overwhelming. However, some Copilot users have hit back at this criticism – noting that, if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t really be blowing a lot of tokens all the time. The people who spend this much money are vibe-coders with little real development experience, those critics maintain.

“The big difference between some of us who work all day but aren’t old yet and these screenshots. It’s hard to believe it’s such a complex difference at work,” another user wrote. “The only way it gets crazy is if you’re ‘vibe writing’ with a lot of bloated repetition,” they added later. “It’s very affordable even for small properties when used as a tool, for any provider.”

Others focus on the surprising economics behind the company’s previous model. “Holy fuck how much money did the pilot lose,” said one Redditor in a recent post.

Good question.

The economics behind Copilot didn’t always seem very easy to use, and the amount the company must have spent to support the continued release of vibe code for its user base is equally mysterious and hidden from public view.

While some criticized the changes and others criticized those criticisms, some voices on the Internet argued that developers have good reason to be upset, since Microsoft encouraged users to use its chatbot indiscriminately and now they seem to pull the microphone out from under them.

“For all the naysayers … people using the program the way Microsoft designed it (and even encouraged it to be used this way), honestly the only fault here is Microsoft. Microsoft provided this payment method and keeps making it easier and easier to burn large numbers of tokens for single premium requests that can run for hours or days while generating dozens or thousands of users,”

TechCrunch reached out to Microsoft for comment, but it did not respond by press time.