For many people, GitHub Copilot was the first AI assistant in the editor. Mine too. Since early June, Microsoft bills it differently — a good moment to take honest stock.
Up front, so it's clear: what follows is my personal experience and my opinion. I used Copilot over a long stretch alongside two competitors — Roo Code, now succeeded by Zoo Code, and Claude Code. Try it yourself and form your own view.
What Changed About the Price
Until now, Copilot charged a flat monthly fee and gave you a set number of "premium requests." Since June 1, 2026, it runs on "GitHub AI Credits": every plan includes a monthly allowance, and usage is counted by tokens — input, output, all of it. Once the allowance is gone, you pay per token (1 credit = 1 US cent).
Entry (Pro) currently costs around $10 a month, Pro+ sits at $39. The reaction among developers was, to put it gently, not thrilled — many fear unpredictable costs.
And this is exactly where it gets interesting. Because token-based billing isn't new — it's the very model I'd already struggled with on another tool.
Three Tools, Three Experiences
Roo/Zoo Code I genuinely like. It's open source, built by people who use it daily themselves — and you can feel that in the quality. In my eyes it didn't just catch up to Copilot, it clearly outclassed it. One sign of how many developers rely on it: on OpenRouter, the big model broker, Roo/Zoo Code sits near the top of the app ranking — around 30 billion tokens a month. Copilot is missing from that list entirely, because it does its own thing.
The catch with Roo/Zoo Code: you bring your own API key and pay per token. With heavy use, that makes you poor. Really. The quality holds up; the bill at month's end sometimes less so.
Copilot, by contrast, delivered the weakest results of the three in my tests. That's my subjective impression after extended use — but a clear one. To me the tool often felt as if selling came first and coding second. That I stuck with it anyway was down to the convenient subscription and the bundles that swallowed the frustration.
Claude Code has simply been doing the actual work for a few months now. For me the cost-to-benefit ratio is unbeatable: on a subscription I get a generous usage allowance that refills every few hours — more output for better money, instead of nervously watching the token counter. Entry is around $20; there are larger tiers above it (I myself now use the roughly €100 one). This blog, by the way, is written with it — the critical proofreading of each post is then handled by MiniMax in the GitLab pipeline.
The Codium Factor
One more point that rarely comes up. I work with VS Codium — the open-source twin of Microsoft's VS Code. The relationship is roughly like Chromium to Chrome: same engine, without the vendor baggage.
On Codium, the Copilot plugin only runs after a lot of fiddling. Claude Code and Roo/Zoo Code, on the other hand, just work there — straight as an extension, no contortions. To me that's a clear signal of who takes open tools seriously and who doesn't.
My Verdict
With the new billing, Copilot is, in my view, sawing off the branch it sits on. Yes, per user Microsoft will likely turn a better profit. But the paying human faces the decisive question: why pay for Copilot when the same money gets me the open-source Roo/Zoo Code — or a Claude Code subscription with more usage and (for me) a better result?
Billing by tokens while delivering weaker quality than rivals you can get for free or on a fair subscription — that math doesn't add up for me.
An honest caveat still belongs here, though: if users don't desert Copilot in droves, Anthropic could take this model as a template and eventually switch Claude to token-based billing too. We can't know that. But should it come to that, the cards get reshuffled — and I'll look just as critically then.
Fair criticism should be allowed, and this is mine. Maybe Copilot fits your workflow better than mine — you'll only find out by laying the alternatives side by side. That's exactly what I'd advise.
And as I type this, it strikes me: Roo Code has since become Zoo Code — and what's behind that rename would easily deserve an article of its own. Noted. Maybe soon.
Unpaid recommendation, my own opinion — as always here.