[Kon5ole]

I am a huge fan of Copilot CLI. It just feels so logical and low-friction to use compared to Claude Code. Having the ability to juggle various models at will is really nice too. ("Plan this using Opus 4.6, let GPT 5.4 verify the plan and give feedback before implementing with Sonnet 4.6").

Unfortunately the June pricing change for Copilot forced me personally as well as my entire department at work to switch to Claude Code. With copilot we were hitting a few dollars of extra spend over the included credits in April and May, then in June we started chewing through the monthly budget every 2-3 days.

Just a completely insane price hike from the customer's perspective, I don't know what MS were thinking there.

Even if that is the price they need to be sustainable they should have waited until the competition changed their prices first. I wouldn't be surprised if Copilot lost 50% or more of their customer base last month.

Eventually this could be where all the major players set their prices, so the thought occurs to me that nations should run some form of "public access AI", just like they did for TV. Use the free open models and use tax money to finance a few datacenters. Geo-lock the use and set strict throttles to manage load, but let school children and citizens use that AI freely otherwise.

If Copilot's pricing is the level for all AI in a few years, only the unicorn companies can afford to use them, and everybody else has no chance of competing with a company that can use AI.

[ffsm8]

> they should have waited until the competition changed their prices first.

They did...

They're literally just passing on the costs https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

Anthropic just provides a subscription - which Enterprise usually doesn't want you to use because everything you're submitting through that will be trained on / becomes part of their model.

So If you use it without explicit permission from your employer you may be committing a contract violation which can have serious consequences - up to jail time - as they can sue you for that.

[ac29]

> Anthropic just provides a subscription - which Enterprise usually doesn't want you to use because everything you're submitting through that will be trained on / becomes part of their model.

My Pro account very clearly has a toggle for "Help improve our AI models: Allow the use of your chats and coding sessions to train and improve Anthropic AI models."

[ffsm8]

Which they may or may not adhere to

> Our use of Materials [...] Even if you opt out, we will use Materials for model training when: (1) you provide Feedback to us regarding any Materials, or (2) your Materials are flagged for safety review to improve our ability to detect harmful content, enforce our policies, or advance our safety research.

The last part is essentially a catch all, which let's them train on everything they want - and they probably are.

But the important bit here isn't actually wherever they're actually training on it - that doesn't matter from the legality aspect of it. You're liable anyway, as all contracts I've ever signed explicitly forbid me from sharing internal data of any kind (including code) with third parties.

You can be prosecuted just from using it - wherever anthropic decides to train it's model on it or not.

[phillipcarter]

It's a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.

If you use Claude via API in your own app, you're paying full price.

If you have an "API Plan" for Claude Code (i.e., free), you're paying full price.

If you have a Pro, Max, Max 5x, or Max 20x, your tokens are subsidized up until a rate limit. Then you pay full price for usage thereafter, until the end of the billing cycle.

The widespread belief in industry right now is that the per-seat pricing (which Copilot bailed from first) is going to go away in the near-term.

[ffsm8]

It's not more complicated? I referenced the subscription... I just added a small warning about it as some people may or may not be aware about the fact they're opening themselves up to serious consequences if they decide to use it on their employers code without explicit permission... Depending on their employers digression, eg largish entrenched employers which value their IP will be more willing to inflict damages on you. An upstart will likely not care unless the CEO sees an opportunity to profit personally.

[nsbk]

The price hike was insane. My $dayjob is moving away from Copilot and into Claude Code subscriptions. In parallel we are testing AWS bedrock and Deepinfra for open weight models in preparation for when CC inevitably stops being such a good deal and aligns with actual token cost. Fun times.

[Incipient]

I had to do the same. I expect everything will go token pricing, and at that point a LOT of small/mid businesses will drastically change how they use code.

I've swapped to the 20x Claude plan for a month or two to knock out two ideas I need to get it MVP - expecting Claude to go token priced soon.

[ofjcihen]

Hell it’s past small and mid. I do work for a few of the fortune 100s and what I’m hearing is somewhere between “justify all of your usage or don’t use it” to “you now get 500 bucks a month, go over that and you’re getting it revoked”

[K3UL]

The price hike was insane yes, but because they were eating the price difference. How exaclty does moving to a Claude sub is better, when it's actually more expensive ?

At my company we did the comparison and Copilot still wins: for 20$ you get a seat and 20$ of usage, whereas with Claude enterprise you get a seat and then usage is completely added. Moreover usage in Copilot is exactly the price of the providers AND it allows us to use various models from multiple providers.

The case that might be less expensive is if you negociate a volume discount with AWS for Bedrock usage, but that is also possible with GitHub and Microsoft.

[nsbk]

Last month we consumed all the subscription credits by the 7th day, and had to top the extra credits up every 2-3 days. Last month was definitely not cheaper than a CC subscription. It actually triggered a cost savings effort across the Engineering org (cancelling subscriptions, stopping environments,...) in order to be able to afford AI usage which was not appropriately budgeted for ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Edit: wording on the cost saving effort

[fc417fc802]

> Last month was definitely not cheaper than a CC subscription.

How is that possible? AFAIK copilot charges the same price per token that claude does. They don't offer fixed price subscriptions to enterprise customers (again AFAIK but even if they did presumably they would match the price).

The only exception I'm aware of is volume discounts and you can get those from both copilot and bedrock (and presumably also vertex).

[pantulis]

> I am a huge fan of Copilot CLI. It just feels so logical and low-friction to use compared to Claude Code.

Honest question, can you ellaborate? If given the option, I use OpenCode but what do you find in Copilot CLI that makes you prefer it to Claude Code?

[Kon5ole]

It's a combination of small things really. The mentioned ability to easily call on various models in the same prompt, having agent definitions be able to orchestrate other agents just by mentioning it in the description, doing things like goal/loop automatically.

There is also IMO a distinct difference in "tone" in the dialogue. Claude seems to impersonate a human a bit more than I like.

Claude is of course very good as well and does a few things better than copilot too, but overall I'd prefer to use Copilot.

[dluxem]

Same mindset here. I really like the ability of having OpenAI, Anthropic and other models available.

For my personal work, I still use Claude Code as its cheaper and the limits don't bother me to much, but it feels a bit like being handcuffed to Anthropic vs being at work and freely selecting models.

[gwerbin]

Not OP but Copilot CLI is really straightforward, almost minimal in some sense. It's a lot like OpenCode but stripped down.

I also use the Copilot ACP server inside Pycharm and that works decently well too, although it has some annoying bugs, but if you're a Jetbrains user you're used to annoying bugs.

[lanthissa]

i ran out of claude credits for the first time at work in months and had to fallback to copilot.

pleasantly surprised, claude's way ahead in tooling but the ability to designate what model your subagents use and having access to all models is a better feature than all of what claude offers combine atm.

The only limit on the amount of ai can consume in a month a work is dollars, so anything that helps with cost is the best model/harness for me.

It also did a better job at smart designating subagents itself where as claude often used higher cost models.

[monooso]

You can tell Claude Code which model to use for subagents.

For example: https://github.com/monooso/dotfiles/tree/main/.claude/agents

[lanthissa]

i can tell claude to call haiku or sonnet.

in copilot i can could pass all my automated browser testing to 3.5 flash, could use dirt cheap models for simple tool that were better than claude.

i'd just use open router but @work we only have copilot and claude

[deckar01]

Letting them automatically pick the model is no longer sustainable, but there are some very efficient models that are capable of executing the plan created by a much nicer model. It’s kind of embarrassing to think that Microsoft’s auto model selection was choosing cutting edge reasoning models for tasks like resolving dependency conflicts back when their pricing was at a loss.

[matteocontrini]

Copilot's main target is probably enterprises, who already pay per token with both Claude and Codex, on top of a per-seat subscription. With Copilot they get both Claude and Codex and many other models in one subscription. Also, per-seat price includes usage and the cost of extra usage is identical to going direct with model providers. I'd say it makes sense.