GitHub Copilot's metered billing went live, and developers are watching credits vanish in hours

Eight percent of a monthly credit allowance gone in two hours. That's a real Copilot Pro+ user after metered token billing took effect June 1. Another spent over $6 on a single change request. A Claude 4.8 session reportedly ate 1,180 credits, roughly 16% of a Pro+ allowance, in one go.

Copilot now prices each request by model, request type, input size, and response complexity. The flat-rate "$10 or $20 a month and code all you want" era is closing. And the developer response is migration: people are routing through OpenRouter, RooCode, LM Studio, or going direct to Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. TechCrunch quoted one dev calling it "what a joke" outright.

Connect this to the Fable 5 burn above. Same physics, different vendor. The most capable models do more work per request, and "more work" now shows up on an invoice. The free lunch was the subscription absorbing variance. That's over. Cursor added Premium usage seats in the same window. This isn't one company's bad decision, it's the category repricing.

I don't think metering is wrong, honestly. The economics of running these models don't support all-you-can-eat at $20. But it changes how you have to work. Cost-per-task is now a first-class selection criterion, right next to capability and latency.

What to do, concretely. Set hard usage caps so a runaway agent loop can't surprise you with a $200 day. Put a bring-your-own-key abstraction layer in front of your harness so swapping providers is a config change, not a rewrite. manifest (~6,915 stars) is a TypeScript BYOK layer built for exactly this, connecting agents to any provider behind one interface. Route heavy agentic work through the cheapest model that clears the bar, and reserve frontier tiers for the hard stuff. And use Claude Code's new /usage breakdown (more on that below) to find which skill or MCP server is quietly eating your budget. The practitioner hygiene here, cap, route, downshift, attribute, is becoming standard. Build it into your setup now, not after your first shock invoice.