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There is noticeable trend across all agentic coding platforms that this situation is no longer sustainable. With this kind of pricing (sonnet 4.6 has 9x multip

by _pdp_ 6mo ago

There is noticeable trend across all agentic coding platforms that this situation is no longer sustainable. With this kind of pricing (sonnet 4.6 has 9x multiplier, previously 1x) it begs the question why use Copilot to begin with. You could easily just buy the tokens directly and have a lot more choice as well.

bsdz 6mo ago
Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?
- ihsw 6mo ago
  [dead]
- infecto 6mo ago
  Looking at their pricing it does not look the case.
- minimaxir 6mo ago
  Economics of scale don't work when scale still isn't enough and capacity is still limited. GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.
  - vdfs 6mo ago
    Economics of scale don't scale
- _pdp_ 6mo ago
  It seems to me more expensive but I might be reading it wrong.
sottol 6mo ago
One reason I used it was that I wasn't locked into a single provider and switching them was as easy as changing a drop-down. Small feature? Sonnet or GPT5.4/mini? Large changes? Opus. And why not see how good Raptor Mini does this one refactor? It also helped build an intuition of what wach model could do and which parts it was weaker at because you could try them almost side by side, especially if one model's output wasn't great. That said, these were all side projects so nothing truly consequential. Otoh, you might leave some extra perf on the table but I found the models worked quite with the Copilot harness.
- Waterluvian 6mo ago
  Yeah, this is a very useful abstraction layer. The entire concept of separating the model creator from the model runner is good for competition and is customer friendly. Which means they likely hate the concept and want to kill it. Gosh, imagine getting to do that with your TV/Streaming subscription. Getting to pay one fee to access some set number of hours per month from any of the providers.
Incipient 6mo ago
The problem is I can't afford the tokens! Even on my $10/mo plan, running either 100 opus, or 300 sonnet agent runs would cost hundreds of dollars - well above my budget!

by _pdp_ 6mo ago

bsdz 6mo ago

Doesn't GitHub get volume discounting they can pass on to their Copilot customers?

ihsw 6mo ago
[dead]
infecto 6mo ago
Looking at their pricing it does not look the case.
minimaxir 6mo ago
Economics of scale don't work when scale still isn't enough and capacity is still limited. GitHub has the full power of Azure with their hosted models but it's not being passed to consumers.
- vdfs 6mo ago
  Economics of scale don't scale
_pdp_ 6mo ago
It seems to me more expensive but I might be reading it wrong.

sottol 6mo ago

One reason I used it was that I wasn't locked into a single provider and switching them was as easy as changing a drop-down. Small feature? Sonnet or GPT5.4/mini? Large changes? Opus. And why not see how good Raptor Mini does this one refactor? It also helped build an intuition of what wach model could do and which parts it was weaker at because you could try them almost side by side, especially if one model's output wasn't great. That said, these were all side projects so nothing truly consequential. Otoh, you might leave some extra perf on the table but I found the models worked quite with the Copilot harness.

Waterluvian 6mo ago
Yeah, this is a very useful abstraction layer. The entire concept of separating the model creator from the model runner is good for competition and is customer friendly. Which means they likely hate the concept and want to kill it. Gosh, imagine getting to do that with your TV/Streaming subscription. Getting to pay one fee to access some set number of hours per month from any of the providers.

Incipient 6mo ago

The problem is I can't afford the tokens! Even on my $10/mo plan, running either 100 opus, or 300 sonnet agent runs would cost hundreds of dollars - well above my budget!