Can someone please explain the logic behind GitHub’s new usage-based billing? You pay $39 a month for Copilot Pro+, and in return, you get exactly $39 in "monthly AI credits".
If you don't use 100% of that allowance by the end of the month, you just lose it. You are literally just buying an expiring gift card every 30 days. If I wanted to track my token usage and pay for what I consume, I would bypass the middleman entirely, plug my Anthropic or OpenAI API key into Cline or Cursor, and just pay wholesale rates.
This whole transition completely trashes the workflow we've spent the last year building. We were pushed to use agentic features and told to write comprehensive, heavy-context prompts to get good results. We learned how to do exactly that, and now they are financially penalizing us for it. Every time you write a highly detailed prompt with good context, you are punished for burning through your credits.
It is incredibly frustrating that actual paying customers are the ones taking the hit. It really feels like we are just subsidizing the free student accounts, or footing the bill because GitHub couldn't figure out how to stop the heavy abusers.
They baited everyone with an unlimited flat rate to build dependence on their ecosystem, and now they are flipping the switch to a token-counting stress test. It's a massive betrayal of the original deal.