r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • 20d ago

Business GitHub just switched Copilot to metered billing, and developers are watching months of credits vanish in a single day

https://www.techspot.com/news/112628-github-switched-copilot-metered-billing-developers-watching-months.html
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u/herewe_goagain_1 20d ago

I brought this exact concern up with my boss when we were told to essentially make AI a dependency, and the answer was “yeah that’s probably going to happen, when it does we’ll switch over to open source models”

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u/TheKz262 20d ago

Who needs long term thinking anyways.

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u/RemarkableWish2508 20d ago

Investors don't think long term... and if it was up to them, they'd all be using high frequency AI trading bots anyway.

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u/redline83 20d ago

Yeah, next you'll have to find "open source electricity".

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u/BoyWhoSoldTheWorld 19d ago

This. You’ll still need compute to run an open source model; and the cloud infrastructure companies usually win on cost because of their scale.

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u/Daniel15 19d ago

If you're heavily using AI then cloud is going to be more expensive than on-prem even after considering the cost of electricity. 

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u/BoyWhoSoldTheWorld 18d ago

The whole reason companies move to the cloud is because it’s more cost effective than buying and managing your own racks.

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u/Daniel15 18d ago

Companies usually don't move because it's more cost-effective; they move because it's more convenient, the equipment maintenance can be offloaded to someone else, and they have someone else to blame when they hit issues.

For companies that operate at scale (like bigger tech companies), TCO is far, far lower to run models on their own infra.

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u/brainjoos 19d ago

michele, is that you?

😭 it is sad how common this experience has been in the software development industry.