Now that developers and creatives are sufficiently accustomed to using AI, the AI companies are reeling them in with monetization that is considerably more expensive than it was. AI Central has the details:
At one cent per credit, billing accrues on input, output, and cached tokens at the published per-model API rate. On Copilot Pro, the included 1,500 monthly credits carry a face value of $15 against a $10 plan price. On Pro+, 7,000 credits worth $70 accompany a $39 subscription. Code completions and Next Edit Suggestions draw no credits under any paid plan, and the new system eliminates the cheaper-model fallback that users with exhausted PRU credits could previously invoke.
On the first day of the new billing period, one Pro+ developer wrote in GitHub’s community forum that two hours of work had consumed 8% of a monthly 7,000-credit allocation, projecting full depletion in under two days. A separate developer reported that a single request to a large project had cost more than $6, writing in the same forum that such costs made reliable budgeting impossible for individual developers. On Reddit, a user reported that a single Claude 4.8 session had consumed 1,180 credits, 16% of a monthly Pro+ allowance, while returning suggestions described as mediocre and leaving the underlying problem unsolved.
On Copilot’s published model menu, GPT-5.5 output tokens cost 24 times more than GPT-5.4 nano output tokens, turning model selection into a direct billing variable. A modeled task representing heavy agentic iteration, defined as 250,000 input tokens and 20,000 output tokens, runs to 185 credits on GPT-5.5 and 27.75 on MAI-Code-1-Flash, a 6.7-fold cost gap for the same work.
This is a bit ironic, especially for writers, since the last FOUR Claude models have all been observably worse at writing fiction than version 4.5, which is no longer available. Opus 4.6 is still usable, but who knows how much longer access to it will be permitted? Fortunately, the newer models can still handle translations and non-fiction, albeit in a very bland, uniform style in the case of the latter.
Speaking of AI Central, this weekend I put up a post featuring not one, but two music videos, one an updated version of IF YOU HAD A TIME MACHINE, the other a work-in-progress of CHIBA CITY BLUES. Quality-wise, the video technology is about 18 months behind the audio quality, but it’s coming along quickly.
Whether it will remain readily affordable, of course, is an entirely different question.