11 ms·

GitHub's Copilot AI for Business now available for $19/month

30 points by thoughtpeddler 4y ago

faeriechangling 4y ago
Overpriced. ChatGPT has made me wonder why Copilot is worth so much.
- cehrlich 4y ago
  If Copilot and ChatGPT cost the same and I could only have one, I'd pick Copilot.
- tombert 4y ago
  I've never used Copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't have a way to integrate directly in your editors?
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    > I've never used Copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't have a way to integrate directly in your editors? And I suspect it would be too slow for use in an editor the way ChatGPT seems to be throttled.
- fabiospampinato 4y ago
  Copilot is useful because the cost to ask it something is effectively zero. If you have 2 lines of boilerplate code to write you aren't going to ask chatGPT to write it for you because just asking it costs more than solving the problem yourself.
  - ClapperHeid 4y ago
    >Copilot is useful because the cost to ask it something is effectively zero... Copiolot requires you to enter payment details, to access the trial period. ChatGPT is available to use for free, as long as you're prepared to put up with the fact access may not always be instantly available during busy periods. So the reality is the reverse of what you say.
    - elashri 4y ago
      I think the comment means coet in terms of time not money
    - fabiospampinato 4y ago
      I mean if one's time is worth approximately $0/hour then I stand corrected and indeed Copilot is more expensive than chatGPT.
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    If I have a 10-100 line script to pump out, these days I don’t bother using an IDE + copilot I’m going to ask ChatGPT to do it and never leave the console until it gets it right. Then I might use chatgpt to draft up an email afterwards. This makes me feel like it’s copilot that’s the one forcing me to disrupt my workflow rather than the other way around because ChatGPT already is being used so heavily by me.
- falcor84 4y ago
  I don't get what you mean - ChatGPT Plus is priced even higher ($20/month) and doesn't have an editor integration
  - faeriechangling 4y ago
    I already see some DIY attempts at some level of editor integration like codeGPT and I’m aware chatGPT is more expensive but it provides several times the value of copilot. Not only do I find chatGPT more useful at coding it can also do things like draft emails amazingly well. I cancelled my $10 copilot subscription after chatGPT came out and am happy to pay whatever ChatGPT is charging. I just can’t justify paying for both at current pricing. Copilot made me faster at pumping out boilerplate but when ChatGPT is already being used by me to pump out boilerplate and so much more it feels too expensive for something so redundant. $120/yr to $240/yr USD is a TON to pay for a nice-to-have. Cut the price in half or even offer a Chatgpt+copilot bundle with a discounted price and I’ll consider it.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Extremely cheap from an enterprise perspective
jmclnx 4y ago
Is it $19 per person or $19 per business ? In anycase, nothing I would ever use, not that M/S would care.
- zapt02 4y ago
  That's obviously the price per seat.
icelancer 4y ago
Why is it ~twice as expensive as a per-user license? Right now we just reimburse our analysts/developers the $10/month for the Copilot fees. I see no reason to go to a more expensive plan just so we can manage their licenses. The following add-ons for an additional $108/year per person don't seem worth it at all. [0] -Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?) -Organization-wide policy management (huh?) -Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person) -Corporate proxy support (what even is this) EDIT: How do you do single line breaks on HN, anyway? Markdown doesn't work (two spaces or backslashes) and the help docs don't specify: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc [0]: Plus, the individuals don't get their credit card rewards. Employees love expensing things for free rewards.
- tssva 4y ago
  Expecting your employees to provide you monthly loans to cover recurring expenses is a pretty poor policy.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
    Conversely, ignoring that your employees purchase on their own a tool which helps them with their job is a pretty poor policy. One might even think someone who doesn't ignore such a situation and instead says, "Hey, I'll reimburse you for that!" is being kind.
    - tssva 4y ago
      Why purchase a tool for the benefit of your job which your employer will not pay for? If I am less efficient at my job because they won't purchase it, then that is their decision. Less efficient it is.
      - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
        > Why purchase a tool for the benefit of your job which your employer will not pay for? This is shifting the goalposts. Your initial comment assumed[0] that the employer had an expectation that the employee would pay for these things and I was intending to provide an alternate perspective. You can make your own decisions but it doesn't make sense to act like other employees have no agency. To answer the question, some people have a hobby that is also their job. Purchasing the tool for the hobby means they can use it for the job and an employer is being kind when they notice this situation and choose to reimburse the employee for their purchase. The point is, there's more room for understanding that one likely doesn't have the full picture. It is worth checking assumptions from time to time. [0] > Expecting your employees to provide you monthly loans ...
LouisSayers 4y ago
I'm curious to hear how others have found Copilot? I've been using it the last few weeks and I find it kind of marginal in value. It was quite helpful with filling out some kubernetes type details and it makes some decent guesses when declaring constants. I also had it rewrite a line of code to order keys in a string. Otherwise I find you really have to keep an eye on what it's doing - even simple things like function invocations it can get wrong e.g. incorrect arguments being passed to a method (where argument types aren't even matching). Also I guess results depend on the language - I tried to get it to write a simple golang http server with a handler and couldn't figure out how to prompt it to write one. I'm actually looking forward to a better Gopilot. It seems like doomsdayers do well in getting publicity, but to me it feels more like a refactoring tool that can help to speed up the development process (and teach me a few things along the way).
- tracker1 4y ago
  I have a friend that's found ChatGPT helpful in a similar way... it's not quite right, but enough to get going in a direction. Dave's Garage on youtube did a decent walkthrough for working with ChatGPT, and was interresting. It's definitely not at doomsayer levels, and don't think it will ever get there, you still have to understand enough to know if it's even right. Similar for general facts and writing things like research papers.
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    I'm using the davinci-3 model as a sort of programming macro. You need to know something about what you want to do and how you want to do it. Then you just poke the model so it gives you what you want. It's also very handy to have it mock test data and even write unit tests that aim to cover your cases as well. It's just fantastic.
- glacials 4y ago
  It’s really good for rote stuff. In particular writing if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf(“helpful context: %w”, err) } in Go, or getting the structure for some YAML down so you can go off and edit it. It’s also super helpful for languages whose ethe value building utility functions over importing them, like parsing environment variables into types in Python. So many people have written their own functions to do this that the training set is pretty good.
mark_l_watson 4y ago
So, last year I paid $100 for a year of CoPilot. It works well enough for me. I am curious how much better this new product works, but I am not going to spend the money for it right now.
Someone1234 4y ago
Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code) is horribly broken, and even at $10/month it wasn't worth it, let alone $19/month. Considering that Visual Studio is used by enterprises mostly, I don't know how many will jump into this $19/month subscription until the product is much, much, better. It isn't the "AI" side that is broken. It is just a buggy extension, crashes constantly, and even when it does give suggestions it takes far too long to do so harming your workflow. Check out the less than 2.5 star average reviews on the VS Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.copilotvs&ssr=false#review-details https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c... Honestly if you're a Visual Studio developer, I'd say ChatGPT Plus for $20/month is better value than Copilot in its current form which is should be free while they iron out all the bugs. Or if you REALLY want to use Copilot, then you'll need to switch to VS Code instead since the extension in that at least works correctly.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  I've used Copilot for VSCode for a little over a week now and I can't say that it's "horribly broken" at all. I've had issues getting it activated but after that, it just works for me. I'd make sure you use the latest of both, VSCode and Copilot extension.
  - Keats 4y ago
    > Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code)
    - barbazoo 4y ago
      Sorry, I misread, my bad.
- tracker1 4y ago
  What's kind of funny is, I've gone completely the other route... I've been using VS Code almost exclusively, even for a handful of .Net (Core/5+) projects. I will say the .Net extension for VS Code is lacking though, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks it's intentionally borked by MS. I find the experience is generally better for everything that isn't C#/.Net I just literally setup Copilot, though haven't really used it yet. I also haven't worked much with ChatGPT, but may give that a try as well. I'm starting on a Rust project and really unfamiliar with the language, even after reading a couple books at this point. The learning curve has been steeper than other languages I've worked with, so willing to try the leg up approach at this point.
arduinomancer 4y ago
I’m curious if enterprise customers would have license concerns about the code produced from using this. Have any big companies set policies on employees using these kind of tools? Do they allow them?
freeming 4y ago
On the one hand the business case is easy to make as it makes me at least $500/month more productive than without CoPilot, on the other hand I don't see why someone would use CoPilot for Business over the individual version.

faeriechangling 4y ago

Overpriced. ChatGPT has made me wonder why Copilot is worth so much.

cehrlich 4y ago
If Copilot and ChatGPT cost the same and I could only have one, I'd pick Copilot.
tombert 4y ago
I've never used Copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't have a way to integrate directly in your editors?
- barbazoo 4y ago
  > I've never used Copilot, but ChatGPT doesn't have a way to integrate directly in your editors? And I suspect it would be too slow for use in an editor the way ChatGPT seems to be throttled.
fabiospampinato 4y ago
Copilot is useful because the cost to ask it something is effectively zero. If you have 2 lines of boilerplate code to write you aren't going to ask chatGPT to write it for you because just asking it costs more than solving the problem yourself.
- ClapperHeid 4y ago
  >Copilot is useful because the cost to ask it something is effectively zero... Copiolot requires you to enter payment details, to access the trial period. ChatGPT is available to use for free, as long as you're prepared to put up with the fact access may not always be instantly available during busy periods. So the reality is the reverse of what you say.
  - elashri 4y ago
    I think the comment means coet in terms of time not money
  - fabiospampinato 4y ago
    I mean if one's time is worth approximately $0/hour then I stand corrected and indeed Copilot is more expensive than chatGPT.
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  If I have a 10-100 line script to pump out, these days I don’t bother using an IDE + copilot I’m going to ask ChatGPT to do it and never leave the console until it gets it right. Then I might use chatgpt to draft up an email afterwards. This makes me feel like it’s copilot that’s the one forcing me to disrupt my workflow rather than the other way around because ChatGPT already is being used so heavily by me.
falcor84 4y ago
I don't get what you mean - ChatGPT Plus is priced even higher ($20/month) and doesn't have an editor integration
- faeriechangling 4y ago
  I already see some DIY attempts at some level of editor integration like codeGPT and I’m aware chatGPT is more expensive but it provides several times the value of copilot. Not only do I find chatGPT more useful at coding it can also do things like draft emails amazingly well. I cancelled my $10 copilot subscription after chatGPT came out and am happy to pay whatever ChatGPT is charging. I just can’t justify paying for both at current pricing. Copilot made me faster at pumping out boilerplate but when ChatGPT is already being used by me to pump out boilerplate and so much more it feels too expensive for something so redundant. $120/yr to $240/yr USD is a TON to pay for a nice-to-have. Cut the price in half or even offer a Chatgpt+copilot bundle with a discounted price and I’ll consider it.
oneoff786 4y ago
Extremely cheap from an enterprise perspective

jmclnx 4y ago

Is it $19 per person or $19 per business ? In anycase, nothing I would ever use, not that M/S would care.

zapt02 4y ago
That's obviously the price per seat.

icelancer 4y ago

Why is it ~twice as expensive as a per-user license? Right now we just reimburse our analysts/developers the $10/month for the Copilot fees. I see no reason to go to a more expensive plan just so we can manage their licenses. The following add-ons for an additional $108/year per person don't seem worth it at all. [0] -Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?) -Organization-wide policy management (huh?) -Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person) -Corporate proxy support (what even is this) EDIT: How do you do single line breaks on HN, anyway? Markdown doesn't work (two spaces or backslashes) and the help docs don't specify: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc [0]: Plus, the individuals don't get their credit card rewards. Employees love expensing things for free rewards.

tssva 4y ago
Expecting your employees to provide you monthly loans to cover recurring expenses is a pretty poor policy.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
  Conversely, ignoring that your employees purchase on their own a tool which helps them with their job is a pretty poor policy. One might even think someone who doesn't ignore such a situation and instead says, "Hey, I'll reimburse you for that!" is being kind.
  - tssva 4y ago
    Why purchase a tool for the benefit of your job which your employer will not pay for? If I am less efficient at my job because they won't purchase it, then that is their decision. Less efficient it is.
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 4y ago
      > Why purchase a tool for the benefit of your job which your employer will not pay for? This is shifting the goalposts. Your initial comment assumed[0] that the employer had an expectation that the employee would pay for these things and I was intending to provide an alternate perspective. You can make your own decisions but it doesn't make sense to act like other employees have no agency. To answer the question, some people have a hobby that is also their job. Purchasing the tool for the hobby means they can use it for the job and an employer is being kind when they notice this situation and choose to reimburse the employee for their purchase. The point is, there's more room for understanding that one likely doesn't have the full picture. It is worth checking assumptions from time to time. [0] > Expecting your employees to provide you monthly loans ...

LouisSayers 4y ago

I'm curious to hear how others have found Copilot? I've been using it the last few weeks and I find it kind of marginal in value. It was quite helpful with filling out some kubernetes type details and it makes some decent guesses when declaring constants. I also had it rewrite a line of code to order keys in a string. Otherwise I find you really have to keep an eye on what it's doing - even simple things like function invocations it can get wrong e.g. incorrect arguments being passed to a method (where argument types aren't even matching). Also I guess results depend on the language - I tried to get it to write a simple golang http server with a handler and couldn't figure out how to prompt it to write one. I'm actually looking forward to a better Gopilot. It seems like doomsdayers do well in getting publicity, but to me it feels more like a refactoring tool that can help to speed up the development process (and teach me a few things along the way).

tracker1 4y ago
I have a friend that's found ChatGPT helpful in a similar way... it's not quite right, but enough to get going in a direction. Dave's Garage on youtube did a decent walkthrough for working with ChatGPT, and was interresting. It's definitely not at doomsayer levels, and don't think it will ever get there, you still have to understand enough to know if it's even right. Similar for general facts and writing things like research papers.
- linuxftw 4y ago
  I'm using the davinci-3 model as a sort of programming macro. You need to know something about what you want to do and how you want to do it. Then you just poke the model so it gives you what you want. It's also very handy to have it mock test data and even write unit tests that aim to cover your cases as well. It's just fantastic.
glacials 4y ago
It’s really good for rote stuff. In particular writing if err != nil { return fmt.Errorf(“helpful context: %w”, err) } in Go, or getting the structure for some YAML down so you can go off and edit it. It’s also super helpful for languages whose ethe value building utility functions over importing them, like parsing environment variables into types in Python. So many people have written their own functions to do this that the training set is pretty good.

mark_l_watson 4y ago

So, last year I paid $100 for a year of CoPilot. It works well enough for me. I am curious how much better this new product works, but I am not going to spend the money for it right now.

Someone1234 4y ago

Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code) is horribly broken, and even at $10/month it wasn't worth it, let alone $19/month. Considering that Visual Studio is used by enterprises mostly, I don't know how many will jump into this $19/month subscription until the product is much, much, better. It isn't the "AI" side that is broken. It is just a buggy extension, crashes constantly, and even when it does give suggestions it takes far too long to do so harming your workflow. Check out the less than 2.5 star average reviews on the VS Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.copilotvs&ssr=false#review-details https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.c... Honestly if you're a Visual Studio developer, I'd say ChatGPT Plus for $20/month is better value than Copilot in its current form which is should be free while they iron out all the bugs. Or if you REALLY want to use Copilot, then you'll need to switch to VS Code instead since the extension in that at least works correctly.

barbazoo 4y ago
I've used Copilot for VSCode for a little over a week now and I can't say that it's "horribly broken" at all. I've had issues getting it activated but after that, it just works for me. I'd make sure you use the latest of both, VSCode and Copilot extension.
- Keats 4y ago
  > Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code)
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Sorry, I misread, my bad.
tracker1 4y ago
What's kind of funny is, I've gone completely the other route... I've been using VS Code almost exclusively, even for a handful of .Net (Core/5+) projects. I will say the .Net extension for VS Code is lacking though, the conspiracy theorist in me thinks it's intentionally borked by MS. I find the experience is generally better for everything that isn't C#/.Net I just literally setup Copilot, though haven't really used it yet. I also haven't worked much with ChatGPT, but may give that a try as well. I'm starting on a Rust project and really unfamiliar with the language, even after reading a couple books at this point. The learning curve has been steeper than other languages I've worked with, so willing to try the leg up approach at this point.

arduinomancer 4y ago

I’m curious if enterprise customers would have license concerns about the code produced from using this. Have any big companies set policies on employees using these kind of tools? Do they allow them?

freeming 4y ago

On the one hand the business case is easy to make as it makes me at least $500/month more productive than without CoPilot, on the other hand I don't see why someone would use CoPilot for Business over the individual version.