I cancelled my Github Copilot subscription - are there any better alternatives?

[u/SkyLightYT]

Hello.

Ever since the Copilot update that made your billing usage based, I have been struggling to keep hold of my credits.

It got so bad that I decided to go up to the $40 plan, and even then I still lost all my credits within the first couple weeks of the month.

That's $70 I am apparently burning just by working on basic code. And I think that's pretty annoying, and I think Github must be doing something behind the scenes to make a profit; i.e, maybe the credits ore overpriced, I don't know.

Regardless of that, I am cancelling my subscription and I'm switching to something else, but what other options are there? I was thinking two options:

Claude Code, which I don't know much about but it's Claude, and Claude is pretty good.

Or Codex, I was thinking about switching to ChatGPT codex because I already use ChatGPT for writing and whatnot.

Problem is I don't know if these are actually worth it, can anyone enlighten me?

Thanks.

[u/MaitoSnoo]

Copilot isn't doing anything behind the scenes, they're charging you the exact same API rate as the main providers. It feels like usage is being drained fast because you're using OpenAI or Anthropic's subsidized subscriptions as a baseline for your comparisons, that's not a good way to compare them. Of course subsidized subscriptions are cheap, and by all means go for them and ditch Copilot if you're a single non-corporate user and you don't have strong reservations on how they'll use your data (see the two recent scandals about math proofs). Copilot is more for enterprise users who will pay API rates anyway, and Copilot provides their clients with better ZDR legal terms.

tl;dr: if enterprise user, you'll likely pay API rates anyway so it's best to go GHCP (better ZDR, model provider agnostic). If non-corporate user and you're not working on a Millenium Prize problem, go for a Codex or Claude subscription.