Three months ago, almost every AI coding tool had the same deal: pay a flat monthly fee, use it until you hit a wall. That era is over. On June 1, 2026, GitHub flipped Copilot from counting requests to metering tokens, and the reaction was immediate and ugly. The GitHub community discussion announcing the change has 24 thumbs up and 958 thumbs down. Some developers reported their effective costs jumping 10x to 50x overnight because of which model they had selected.
Meanwhile Claude Code never left the flat-rate model. It just quietly throttles you instead: a five-hour rolling usage window, a weekly cap, and since March, reduced limits during weekday peak hours.
So which billing model actually costs you less? I spent an evening with GitHub's published rate sheets, Anthropic's plan limits, and the third-party calculators that have emerged to track both. Before we start, one disclosure: I run my own AI agent infrastructure on a rented VPS and pay per token through APIs, so I have lived with metered AI billing for two years. I have not personally subscribed to Copilot's new credit system. Every number below comes from primary sources and published rate cards, linked so you can check me.
What Copilot actually changed on June 1
