[lelag]

Given the cost of the infrastructure needed to run those large language models, it's very likely that Microsoft is still operating copilot at a loss. I don't see an issue with it being a paid service as it is a costly service to provide.

What I pity however is that there's no free tier for hobbyists as paying a 10 usd monthly subscription wont make sense when you only code occasionally. For professionals using it everyday, 10 usd / month is inconsequential.

I don't think that would have costed them much more to offer a free allowance to cover say an average coding session of 8 hours per month.

[oefrha]

GitHub Pro is $4/mo and includes 3000 minutes of CI compute per month (private repos), among all the other features. You’re not going to use 7500 minutes worth of compute a month with Copilot. I’ll certain pay up, though.

[natefinch]

CI runs on CPUs, Copilot runs on GPUs. Waaaay different. Especially in this age of cryptocurrencies and chip shortages.

[pcl]

It’d be nice if they made it free if the upstream repo is published publicly under an open source license. They have all that info already.

[az226]

It’s free for open source maintainers.

[blagie]

Open source maintainer here. No, it's not.

100% of what I do is open source. It's used by millions.

It's free for maintainers of "major" open source projects. I'm not sure what a "major" open source project is, but it's clearly not what I do. The only way to know if your open source project qualifies is to try to sign up. If it does, you're given a free option.

[az226]

What repo do you maintain that is used by millions?

[blagie]

I don't connect my real-life identity to my personal identity.

I am the primary author (but not current maintainer) of an open-source project which is reported to be used by over 100 million people, according to (flaky) statistics kept by the current maintainers. That's around 1% of the people in the world.

I don't trust the current maintainers to be honest with numbers (there are lots of ways to estimate numbers of users), but it's definitely in the millions, and it's a project you (and most random people you'll meet in tech, and many outside of tech) will have heard of.

I am currently working on earlier-stage projects, which have smaller communities, but 100% of them are open-source.