GitHub Copilot is now usage-based. What's your team doing about it?

Canceled plan, using china models for a while.

Microsoft has been cutting and cutting what Copilot can do on each of their oh-so-confusing myriad copilot plans. Things I could do last week, I can no longer do. I am so tired of Microsoft's bait-n-switch. I was a beta tester long before they started grouping beta testers and long before the "Insiders" programs began. I'm tired of it. I started slowly switchiing my preferred products a few years ago. It was time for a upgrade to my Surface Pro. I bought a MacBook Air. It is getting close to time to renew my Microsoft 365 subscription. Protonm is an excellent, much more secure end-to-end encryption office suite. Microsoft has gotten too big for its britches!

cancelled plan next month. already try Claude Code, feel great

I'm not using Copilot, but invoices are coming to Claude starting next week as well. I built a tool (I launched here a week or so ago) to support cross-session memory querying. Now it's even more of an imperative to use tools like this. The past month, I've been on a mission to fine-tune my agents to keep them under my monthly budget. It's challenging for sure. I've moved some agents to cheaper or local models, moved as many deterministic things as possible to scripts, etc.

We saw this coming but it still stings. The predictability of a flat monthly fee was the whole reason we picked Copilot for the team in the first place. Now we're back to having conversations about "who's using too many completions" which is exactly the kind of overhead we were trying to avoid by paying for a tool.

For now we're staying on Copilot but watching usage closely for the first month to see where the bill actually lands. If it spikes past what we were paying before, we'll probably move half the team to Claude Code or Cursor and keep Copilot only for the heaviest users. The irony is that a tool meant to save developer time is now creating admin work to manage its own costs.

usage-based sounds fair until nobody on the team is actually tracking their usage. the bill just shows up and then it's a fire drill. hybrid makes the most sense to me... cap the heavy stuff, route simpler tasks to cheaper alternatives. single vendor lock-in was already risky before they changed the pricing

Usage-based is the part that bites: your cap is now premium requests (300/mo on Pro, 1,500 on Pro+) with overage billing, so "unlimited" quietly became a meter. I got tired of every provider changing these terms without telling anyone, so I built LimitWatch to track current limits and how they drift over time, every number linked to its source. Copilot's on there: https://limitwatch.southforgeai.com/

For solo indie builders the usage-based switch is actually less painful than it sounds. No team governance headache, no justifying a flat seat cost when you're shipping slowly. You only pay when you're productive.

The harder question is whether to stay in the VS Code + Copilot orbit at all. I've been spending more time in Claude Code directly, and the context-window approach it takes feels more useful than inline autocomplete for the kind of feature-building work that actually moves a project forward.

Curious how others are weighting the "inline suggestion" tools vs the "whole session" tools at this point — the use cases feel increasingly distinct.