Written by Asghar · Chicago · the week the meter switched on
On June 1st, GitHub Copilot stopped being a subscription and became a taxi ride. Same car, same driver, except now there’s a meter on the dash and it’s ticking while you think. Flat $29 a month became “AI Credits” burned by the token — input, output, even the cached ones — and within hours the timeline did what the timeline does: it found the receipts.
One developer ran the numbers on their normal month and watched $29 turn into nearly $750. Another put their estimate at $50 to three grand. The polite consensus settled somewhere around a 10x to 50xincrease for anyone doing the agentic, large-refactor, chat-all-day work that Copilot spent two years teachingus to do. TechCrunch led with a two-word quote — “What a joke”— and The Register went with “angry devs vow to flee.” Nobody had to exaggerate. The screenshots did the work.
01 · the spell that broke
It used to feel like a tool
Here’s the part the pricing deck missed. The reason a flat fee worked wasn’t the price. It was the silence. Twenty-nine dollars bought you the right to stop counting. You could let an agent chew on a gnarly refactor for an hour, throw the whole codebase into context, ask the dumb question four times — and none of it changed the number at the bottom of the page. The tool got out of your way, which is the only thing a tool is supposed to do.
A meter does the opposite. A meter makes you a little bit cheaper every time you reach for it. You start rounding the prompt down. You skip the second attempt. You feel the small tug of the cab fare every time the agent thinks out loud, and that tug is the whole product working against the whole point. One Pro+ user paying $39 reported burning 8% of their monthly credits in two hours— depleted in under two days. The math is bad, but the feeling is worse: the assistant you trusted now flinches when you ask it to try.
A subscription you can forget. A meter you have to manage. They sold you the first one and then, quietly, on a Monday, handed you the second.
02 · the receipts
The timeline, that first week
Not invented. These are the ones that went around. Lightly trimmed, kept honest.
“You will get less, but pay the same price.”
“The difference between request-based and token-based billing could sober up an alcoholic from mere shock.”
“I’ll burn through my allocated credit in a week, then pivot to OpenRouter for the rest of the month. More models, credit rollover.”
That last one is the tell. The moment a tool puts a meter on you, you stop being a user and start being a procurement problem — and procurement problems shop around. The lock-in that felt unbreakable when it was free at the margin gets very breakable the second every keystroke has a price tag.
03 · the bigger meter
This isn’t about Copilot
Copilot is just the loudest one this month. The shape is everywhere now. The software you used to buy became software you rent, and the software you rent is quietly becoming software you meter. First it was a box on a shelf. Then a seat per month. Now it’s a credit per token, a gate that opens when the budget allows and closes when it doesn’t. Run out of credits mid-sprint and there’s no graceful fallback to a cheaper model anymore — you just stop, until an admin or the calendar says otherwise.
I’m not anti-usage-pricing. Inference costs real money and pretending it doesn’t is how you get a company that quietly nerfs the model behind the flat fee instead — the otherway they get you. Metering is honest. What it isn’t is yours. A meter is a relationship where the other party holds the dial, and every relationship like that ends the same way: the dial goes up when their margins want it to, and you find out on a Monday.
04 · the counter-move
Own the thing that can’t be re-priced
I sell source code for a living — buy it once, own it forever, no seat, no meter — so you can fairly accuse me of grinding an axe here. Fine. But the axe is the point. The lesson of meter week isn’t “Copilot bad.” It’s that the layer you don’t own can be re-priced underneath you at any time, and the only durable defense is to own the layers that matter.
Own your code. Own your prompts and your evals — they’re assets, not chat history. Keep a model you can run yourself in your back pocket, even if it’s dumber, because a dumber model you control beats a brilliant one that can lock you out at the budget line. Treat every “magical” hosted capability as rented until proven otherwise, and know your exit before you need it. The developers who shrugged at meter week weren’t the ones paying $29. They were the ones who’d already made sure $29 wasn’t load-bearing.
The cloud rents you capability. Ownership is just the refusal to let someone else hold the dial on the part you can’t do without.
Copilot will be fine. Microsoft will tune the credits, publish a calmer blog post, and most people will stay because leaving is annoying and the autocomplete really is good. That’s allowed. Just notice what changed on June 1st: not the price, the posture. The tool stopped being something you had and started being something you’re allowed to use, for now, at a rate to be determined. Keep something in your stack that nobody gets to re-meter. That part is yours.
— Asghar