GitHub Copilot Has Become Too Expensive for Hobby Developers

[bulltuning]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

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I want to share my honest experience, because this has become extremely frustrating.

GitHub Copilot has become insanely expensive for the kind of small hobby projects I work on. For one coding task, I was charged around $15. I sent one message and $15 disappeared from my account. My Copilot Pro+ subscription was basically gone in 4 days, with only about 2 days of light usage.

At this point, GitHub Copilot does not feel like a tool for everyone anymore. It feels like you either need to use it professionally for paid work, or you need to be a wealthy hobbyist. For someone like me, who builds small projects as a hobby, this is becoming impossible to support.

Yesterday I just wanted to ask a question about my code. I used Ask mode and added $2 just to get an answer. The $2 was not even enough. So how much is one question supposed to cost? Is God answering me? I have never paid so much money just to get an answer about my own code.

Every little task now feels like you have to throw another $10 into the system just to make basic changes. And when the AI makes a mistake in your code, the money is simply gone. You pay for the mistake, you pay again to fix the mistake, and then you pay again if the next answer is also wrong.

This is unacceptable.

I am cancelling my subscription. Maybe in the future, if GitHub understands how broken this pricing experience feels, I might try again. But right now it feels like having a hole in my pocket. My experience feels like I was tricked into spending money extremely fast without getting reliable value back.

I cannot recommend this to anyone in its current state. The prices are simply out of reach for hobby developers.

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[huangqc123]

I've switched over to Codex, and it’s giving me that sweet taste of generous limits again. Honestly, Codex Plus’s weekly allowance alone makes Copilot Pro's entire monthly quota look tiny—it just can't compete.

[SmokeyKatevin]

If you seek alternatives OpenCode is pretty good.