I am a huge fan of Copilot CLI. It just feels so logical and low-friction to use compared to Claude Code. Having the ability to juggle various models at will is really nice too. ("Plan this using Opus 4.6, let GPT 5.4 verify the plan and give feedback before implementing with Sonnet 4.6").
Unfortunately the June pricing change for Copilot forced me personally as well as my entire department at work to switch to Claude Code. With copilot we were hitting a few dollars of extra spend over the included credits in April and May, then in June we started chewing through the monthly budget every 2-3 days.
Just a completely insane price hike from the customer's perspective, I don't know what MS were thinking there.
Even if that is the price they need to be sustainable they should have waited until the competition changed their prices first. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot lost 50% or more of their customer base last month.
Eventually this could be where all the major players set their prices, so the thought occurs to me that nations should run some form of "public access AI", just like they did for TV. Use the free open models and use tax money to finance a few datacenters. Geo-lock the use and set strict throttles to manage load, but let school children and citizens use that AI freely otherwise.
If Copilot's pricing is the level for all AI in a few years, only the unicorn companies can afford to use them, and everybody else has no chance of competing with a company that can use AI.
I used GitHub Copilot for my VS 2026 development and switched between ChatGPT and Claude. That was before I discovered Claude Code and the Codex app. Copilot was OK for my purposes, and the USD 10 per month fee was enough for my usage.
However, last month they introduced a new pricing model ( I know the old pricing was not sustainable), and my USD 10 was exhausted within days. Because of that, I switched to Claude Code and Codex and have never looked back. Yes, tokens on Claude Code and Codex are subsidized heavily, but let's just enjoy when good things last.
I do feel there is a difference between using Claude via Copilot versus using Claude directly in Claude Code. I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing behind the scenes.
The harness is super important, what tools are available and the system prompts vary from harness to harness.
Anthropic seems to have a modest lead on their harness and models, so it’s a best-of-both-worlds scenario.
> I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing behind the scenes
It’s probably the exact same model, but the tools and the prompts around it are worse, so you get worse results.
So if you use Claude via Copilot in Zed... You use Zed's harness, I think? What does Copilot do, at that point?
I believe you are using https://github.com/github/copilot-cli or potentially this https://github.com/github/copilot-language-server-release#ag... via the Agent Client Protocol https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/agent-client-protocol which means you are indeed using Copilot's harness
ACP is just a standard that bridges harnesses easily into IDEs, Text Editors, or whatever consumes it (I wrote a TUI that consumes them)
The registry for all the agents (tool harnesses) is here https://github.com/agentclientprotocol/registry if you ever are curious to what Zed or IntelliJ are really hooking into
It’s providing the inference of Anthropic models
I had a similar experience moving away from Copilot within Zed. Now using the reasonix harness for Deepseek that makes cache hits almost free. And that's with unsubsidized American providers like Digital Ocean or Cloudflare.
I tried using Zed but with local models it constantly breaks on tool calls. I wanted to like it but the smell of vibing is just too much.
You using models released this year? I hear this complaint a lot, and it's often due to using an old model which is not as good at tool calling as newer models.
Nice.
I paid $6 yesterday for DeepSeek V4 Flash on OpenRouter. That's like $120 dollar for a month, and it's not even a good model.
For DS4 it's much cheaper and reputable to use OpenCode Go $10/mo subscription, or directly with DeepSeek API.
That's quite an achievement, I managed to spend only 2$ on 16 different tasks of v4 pro.
Same ,I switched to cursor. I told it how to invoke msbuild and it can edit away without needing a native Visual studio plugin.. no problems at all. Target language c++
I like using Claude with VS Code through Copilot and I feel it’s given me much better code, that I can control the quality. It’s much more transparent than Claude Code. It’s open source but and the IDE interphase gives so many more features to have you context and control over whats generated. However GitHub Copilot costs have ballooned in recent week, what once took $100 requires $300. This isn’t purely due to their price increases but also the Opus models agents use more tokens. So I’ve moved to Claude Code and I’m happily still using Opus 4.6. Fable and 4.7 seem to do much larger units of work, go off on tangents and make assumptions that frequently results in slop.
My copilot quota finished in maybe 2-3 prompts with claude 4.8 opus. i was expecting it to suck but not this bad. it was good while it lasted though
Finally an alternative to the big dogs that a company can use. People have been asking for a way to run the Chinese models from a trusted provider. Here GitHub delivered!
The performance, if we trust the benchmarks, put it at Sonnet 4.6.
Let’s see if it’s worth it with GitHubs pricing.
Microsoft needs to offer cheaper option since they change to token based billing. GPT-5.4 used to be x1 for yearly subscriber but now it cost 6x. i run out the premium request for just couple prompts. Github copilot for $10 used to be the best value since you get all the US AI labs model for cheap.
CoPilot was an insanely good value while it lasted. Only moneysoft could subsidize a service that much.
> People have been asking for a way to run the Chinese models from a trusted provider
I'm going to be called a chiller again, but at this point I don't care as it is relevant. Synthetic runs their own models for a reasonable price, GLM5.2 & Kimi K2.7-Code included.
Referral link :
Input: $0.95
Cache hit (most important): $0.19
Output: $4.00
This is the same as how much Moonshot charges for it, and it puts it at roughly the price of GPT 5.4 mini, not a bad option.
For some context here is a stupid prompt that wastes tokens: "Play a game of tic tac toe against yourself on a 5x5 board, you need 5 in a row to win."
It costs $0.006 on Kimi K2.7, and you get to see the whole raw reasoning trace.
GPT-5.4 mini costs $0.016 and its summarized.
And in case you are wondering both play incredibly stupidly.
Kimi:
A B C D E
1 . . . . .
2 . . . . .
3 X X X X X
4 . O O O O
5 . . . . .
1: X X X X X
2: O O . . .
3: . . O . .
4: . . . O .
5: . . . . ONice idea. I just asked Haiku to do the same in Claude Chat on iOS: it created a interactive react game, implemented the rules and let it play. Clever move for 1$ input and 5$ output, Anthropic!
Btw if anyone is wondering, GPT 5.5 does the same garbage as 5.4 mini for 4 times the cost.
Fable manages to make a reasonable game, at a cost of 40 cents.
X X O O O
O O X X X
X X X O O
X O O X O
X O X X Owhen i will be extremely bored, I think I will make two models play chess against each other. I bet there's a chess benchmark / llm tournament already somewhere
Models are bad at chess. I am using a middleman to help models play chess and experimenting. https://abhay-ai.github.io/R_Daneel_AI/
Yes significantly cheaper to run compared to the other models, tried it for an hour yesterday and the results look promising.
Saw in a discussion on Reddit that the team is evaluating glm5.2 so hopefully more to come!
Looks like it’s the same price on Fireworks AI?
https://fireworks.ai/blog/kimi-k2p7-code
I don’t know much about them but they did a deal with Microsoft in March:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-fireworks...
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/model...
Says that they are run by Moonshot
Is GitHub Copilot the best positioned platform for enterprise? They support Claude, GPT, Gemini, and now even open weight models. Larger orgs are paying at API rates anyway so it costs just as much as anywhere else. They have a pretty good agent CLI and SDK, and now a desktop app. They have hosted agents, and you can run their 'Agentic Workflows' in CI.
Has their reputation tanked so much that the alternatives get all the buzz? Or is it that non-enterprise users are priced out by the usage costs, so no free marketing?
We just cancelled everyone's plans and rolled liteLLM out internally. We kept it for the insanely cheap tokens, but now that they've switched to the new pricing, they're just like openrouter, just with far fewer models.
The rugpull with the pricing change without further notice was not taken kindly by enterprice.
They were, until they decided to commit suicide for the service.
Competition in coding models has gotten intense. A year ago it felt like choosing between two options. Now the bigger question is which model to route each task to.
Unlike Google, the AI wave appears to deliver positive revenue impacts for Microsoft.
The company does need to integrate the new AI-human-machine interface into its application development SDKs.
When will DeepSeek be available?
The V4 models are already in the Azure AI foundry so maybe a good chance of it coming.
Is there a zero-retention option?
Who really cares? The model multipliers and the artificial currency were the final nail in the Github Copilot coffin.
Enterprises still have big contracts with github, those companies are imposing tight spending limits now and if the open weight models enable those limits to last a bit longer that's probably quite popular.
When will GitHub Copilot support integrating custom models?
It does, but it's very poorly documented and quite unstable (on purpose i think). What the other commenter said about the VSCode BYOK seems to be the more reliable way.
I tried adding a Foundry LLM as Github Copilot custom model and failed miserably. But with VSCode BYOK (and Github Copilot as the interfact) i did get it working, and i can now use Deepseek V4 Flash with Copilot.
AFAIK you can already use custom models in VSCode Copilot, but probably not for cloud workloads yet.
Copilot Chat supports BYOK since Oct 2025 for the VSCode plugin: https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2026/06/18/byok-vscode
Where is the inference running?
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/model...
They are run by Moonshot itself, so probably china
Azure. It was already available on the Azure AI Foundry before.
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/reference/ai-models/model...
On servers that are subject to the CLOUD Act. Expect no GDPR compliance.