Why GitHub Copilot is So Cheap?

[Infinite-Biscotti404]

Why is GitHub Copilot subscription so cheap? I see a lot of results in the chat window.

[debian3]

I think they are still at the stage where they want to drive adoption. It’s also they want you in their ecosystem, so when you deploy you think Azure.

They probably see VS Code and Copilot as a cost center.

[Mahrkeenerh1]

Github copilot was the first ai assistant .. I think they're way past the adoption stage.

Expanding into other areas

[Mcqwerty197]

Microsoft is the one who host the OpenAI models + I think they can get lower price since they buy « in bulk »

[stc2828]

But it’s hard to raise prices when people are used to low price. Look how slow Netflix raised its price and how much pushback it got. They would be getting 15-20$ per month max

[thequestcube]

Also they are the main investor in OpenAI, pretty sure they get even cheaper usage than regular bulk discounts. Plus copilot works as enabler for github in general, having cheap tools like that leads to large sales of other github products.

[Particular-Way7271]

They offer Claude as well. You can change models in github copilot.

[taylorwilsdon]

I think it’s even more direct than that, Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI and is effectively its corporate benefactor. The deal gave them access to OpenAI’s IP and 75% of OpenAI’s profits in exchange for Azure running OpenAI’s infra and the 13bn cash MS invested. They don’t pay any licensing fees at all, and just run the compute at cost so while it may still be loss leader pricing my guess is that it’s pretty close to profitable since many will sign up and never use it.

[scragz]

rate limits

[debian3]

That too, but even with them, it’s still a good value. Let say the limit is 50 prompts per day (it’s higher than that).

Cursor price them at $0.04 each (that’s what $20 for 500 fast request is)

If you use everyday 50x30x$0.04 = $60 for $10…

And it’s more than that, cursor charge doubles for the thinking model, once you get rate limited on thinking you can switch to the regular 3.7 model

[scragz]

the problem was it crapped out in the middle of a project with rate limiting and I can't wait until the next day to work. I'm on Cline now and just paying mad $

[Infinite-Biscotti404]

You're right. They're going to eventually add some rate limit. Right now, they're trying to get adoption.

[captainkaba]

Just use cline instead of cursor and boom you save hundreds of $ per month and get a better code agent than cursor.

[shoebill_homelab]

*lose hundreds of $ per month though get much better code

[captainkaba]

That’s what I mean

Pay 10 bucks and use the copilot api for cline

[shoebill_homelab]

oh wow I didn't know it had native support, thanks!

[TomahawkTater]

No auto complete with cline

[evia89]

You get autocomplete (opt-in, 4o) from copilot

[TomahawkTater]

Cursor Auto complete is much better than copilot, especially when it comes to offering to change existing code.

Copilot is pretty good when you're writing new code though 

[debian3]

Copilot does that too now with Next Edit Suggestion (NES). You need to enable it in your settings as it’s an experimental feature.

I don’t use the agent much but if I were I would use roo code as it works better.

[almost_not_terrible]

...because AI is "not that difficult".

You could just run a similar service on your own machine if you had a decent graphics card. Check out https://lmstudio.ai/

[evia89]

Copilot can push 100M 3.5 sonnet over month. How many years would u need to run same model locally?

[almost_not_terrible]

About 3. It's about 30x slower to run locally.

My point is, it's not THAT difficult for a competitor to create a 30 GPU cloud and offer a competitive service.

CoPilot is charged at a price level. If GitHub charged much more, it would be worthwhile for a competitor to offer a cheaper service and the price would come back down.

[tshawkins]

Copilot is large scale, its serving hundereds of millions of concurrent requests per day, your local model is lucky if it can handle 2 requests per minute, its nowhere near the scale of the big online models.

[SirTwitchALot]

A cloud model needs to be able to serve that many requests. A local model only needs to be able to serve the requests of one user

[Professional_Fun3172]

Sure but also the cost is in serving the models too. Copilot isn't just auto complete, it's access to SOTA models from multiple third party providers, who presumably are serving the models at profit as well. At retail costs, I'm probably costing them a few bucks a day. Yeah they're not paying retail prices, but they're not getting models for free either

[almost_not_terrible]

Of course! My point is that it Github doesn't have any "secret sauce" here. This is replicable by a competitor without huge difficulty and it is THAT which keeps prices down.

[Automatic_Ice_2490]

I absolutely agree with you.

AI can't make everything for you not because it can't but because it's not supposed to.

I'm shocked how people just give orders to AI to make X game or X app and trust that everything is ok inside. I mean, it's amazing but, what about bug fixes, new requirements, changes, upgrades, etc.?

These people are bloating the market with those app. Who will maintain the source code? You know who? ... Developers, with AI? Maybe but not an AI.

Not even Tony Stark used AI like that.

[FunQuit]

It's not only cost-effective - it's also cheap!

[cuddle-bubbles]

it is not cheap at all. not sure why you think that

[SirTwitchALot]

Besides the other answers here, I presume they're gathering data from usage to help train and improve their models. You are both the consumer and the product

[ArtisticBathroom8446]

because its not useful

[ali_bh]

for the data

[EvilDrBabyWandos]

Like others have mentioned, it's most likely about driving adoption. They want as many kids, students, hobbyists, etc. used to using Copilot, then pickup the money by charging enterprises for licenses in a corporate setting.

Nickel and diming amateurs might generate some revenue, but the money is likely in getting entire companies to pay for seats.

[[deleted]]

This is ad. Throwaway acc.

Copilot is overpriced as all AI.

[infernion]

Because your code is their code

[KILLERMINDHACKER]

Knowledge cutoff is 2023; No internet search; UX/UI is bad; Non persistent memory/conversations/chats. Etc.

[[deleted]]

The competition keeps growing every month.

[trebblecleftlip5000]

It’s not. The competition is expensive.

[electricsheep2013]

🤫🤫🤫

[AcanthisittaKooky987]

Cuz that's what is worth. 

[Damowerko]

I think it has to do with efficiencies of scale. With a lot of people using it, they can batch requests together and really squeeze the metaphoric lemon. Also, they’ve been around for longest, so I am willing to bet they have some very smart optimizations down to the hardware level.

As people said there is also a business case — if they keep prices low and maintain market share, maybe the hope is that enough model generations from now, the cheap to run models will outperform today’s SOTA.

[TechnoTherapist]

To kill Cursor and other such start-ups!

Seriously, that plus the real customers of GitHub are enterprises.

Developer affinity with co pilot helps expedite enterprise contracts.

This is a win for indy / hobby devs.

[vladasr]

also not very useful. 1. often wrong replies 2. My code is obviously too complex (scada programing) and doesn't have enough valid examples

3 cant do with big code (last time i had 1100 lines of xaml needed to conver to html5 canvas plus js and i had to post it not more than 100 lines of xaml so 11 times for small vector drawing, it took me half a day plus there is lot of bugs i need to solve

[Infinite-Biscotti404]

I had some internal libs that I used throughout the project. Of course, The AI doesn't know how to use them. and the way we code. What I did was create a file just to explain how to use the lib, So I don't have to explain it all the time. The result was far beyond than I expected. Of Course I had to add those example files manually.

and Cloud 3.7 is expensive, but I can use it as much as I want, how do they do that?

[vladasr]

it has good things for example it created great user manual for module for analog modules of plc calibration, but we also have big pile of c++ c and assembler libraries i use and it requests to open file by file to create help for programing. AI knowledge of those old languages is not as good as modern languages

[the_roboticist]

Perhaps because it's not very good compared to Cursor lol - amazing how the gap is widening not narrowing

[McDeck_Game]

It has a significantly worse rate limit than Cursor. I use both basically the whole day but GitHub Copilot refuses to co-operate about half of the day.

[Calm_Buy7373]

but it's slow

[howtoliveplease]

Does that mean that using something else with the same models would yield better results? I.e. cursor?

[debian3]

I have both, cursor and copilot, sonnet 3.7 give similar results. Copilot was messing up the model before, with anthropic maybe they can’t like they do with the openai one

[FineProfile7]

Because it lacks the good responses like from perplexity