this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
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Yeah especially because they now have some convoluted method involving different counts of processing, cache etc. But the developer has no easy way of seeing those statistics and thus has no feel for them. And developers already have little control over how much tokens a task takes. Which was fine with the flat rate, just use the service. But now that those things actually matter, the stats should be way easier to see?
So in typical Microsoft fashion not only did they raise prices they somehow made it even more shit. Like the AI already sucked, but does the service itself need to suck as well?
Not being able to control costs and very vague productivity improvement claims makes the ROI impossible to calculate. So even if the AI wasn't shit, it would still be hard to figure out if it's even helping at all.
Don't all the providers do this, though? Anthropic/Claude has different pricing based on if you're caching for five mins vs one hour (which are the only two options for cache TTL). https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing
Copilot was uniquely awful at this, because up to until literally days before the switch to usage based billing there was no way for people to track token usage, despite repeated calls from the community.
Microsoft only added a billing "projection" feature on the admin page that was meant to download a spreadsheet (which straight up didn't work for most people) less than a week before the new billing structure.
Ahh, that's not great. I've only ever used it for free since I get the $10/month plan for free as an open-source maintainer (https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/copilot-on-github/set-up-copilot/enable-copilot/set-up-for-teachers-and-os-maintainers) so I've never had to deal with the billing side.
The amount of value they used to provide with the $10 plan felt too good to be true.
Well, the point here is the deception. So, if you can find a similar link from the past from Microsoft…