GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing

Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by kanemcgrath on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:14PM (#47925182)

I liked copilot because I didn't have to think about tokens. I get hung up when having to think about the price of things, and its hard to think about the project at the same time I got to think about token usage like a gas bill. The usage system had its own issues, but having a set amount of requests was a very comfortable way to use a paid AI service.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by cyanydeez on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:15PM (#47925191)

Sounds like you're a candidate for a local model. It's kinda nice not caring what the token count means except as to compaction.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by brushfoot on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:39PM (#47925483)

Not paying per token? Not sending my code to someone else's servers for inference? That's the stuff of sweet dreams for a stingy, paranoid solopreneur like me.

If I could run a local model comparable to even Sonnet 4.6 without shelling out $50K in hardware, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But all I have is a 32 GB of RAM and an old RTX 4080.

Or am I not up to speed? Are there decent coding models that can run on dev laptops? Not that that's what you were suggesting by recommending a local model, necessarily; just curious.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by robertkarl on Monday April 27, 2026 @05:50PM (#47927845)

I am trying to figure this out too... what I am seeing is that the local models like Qwen 3.5 family that fit on hardware like yours handle ambiguity poorly. But are capable of emitting complete apps too.

That, and they have tool use issues.... https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1smzw6s/qwen35_a3...

I would check out the model mentioned in that thread, GGUF unsloth/qwen3.5-35b-a3b on Q4_K_M

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by frabcus on Monday April 27, 2026 @06:48PM (#47928377)

Qwen 3.6 is out now and a touch better than 3.5.

I'm finding Google's Gemma 4 even better though - seems to hold up the agentic loop better than Qwen.

All will load into 20Gb of VRAM. None are amazing, but they do just about work.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by kanemcgrath on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:24PM (#47925310)

I do love using local models when I can, but qwen-35B is the best model I can run, and while its an insanely good local model, it does not compare to the big ones.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by deaux on Monday April 27, 2026 @02:54PM (#47925674)

Have you tried the latest Gemma? You might prefer it to Qwen, depending on what you're doing.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by kanemcgrath on Monday April 27, 2026 @03:16PM (#47925986)

I did, but in almost everything I tried even qwen3.5 was better, and 3.6 was a huge step up.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by deaux on Monday April 27, 2026 @10:41PM (#47929943)

Good to know, did you also try non-coding or is that what you use it for? For tasks unrelated to coding we've generally preferred Gemma.

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Re:GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing by kanemcgrath on Tuesday April 28, 2026 @02:39AM (#47931102)

So far I have done coding projects only, but I have some ideas for some non-coding agent projects in the future, so I'll give Gemma another shot

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