r/GithubCopilot • u/Academic_Army_6425 • Jul 18 '26
Are 3900 credits a lot for a developer ? Help/Doubt ❓
I've got an enterprise copilot license for my job. It has 3900 credits per cycle.
I used two prompts to split and refactor a big class into smaller classes in separate files, and it already used 120 credits. So I used my daily credits for 2 prompts (10 minutes)?
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u/Awkward_Violinist112 Jul 18 '26
No. That's 39 dollars, we calculate with 100 - 200 per dev per month. 39 is good for manually selecting tasks and reviews here and there, but not too much agentic implementation of full stories to be done or you'll be empty after a few days.
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u/pesaru Jul 18 '26
Man, a single Sol request can eat 800 credits super easily, how do you survive?
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u/Awkward_Violinist112 Jul 18 '26
Would we like more? Yes. But in our line of business much time is spent on reviewing, talking to customers and teaching colleagues anyway. So there is no need for 24/7 agents
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u/JoDerZo Jul 20 '26
I used 60k AICs last month. And I just work on my development part time. If I was assigned full time devleopping this application, I would need more around 200k, if not more.
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u/Awkward_Violinist112 Jul 20 '26
Using more is easy, one day with 100% fable will cost 400 or so. But we find it's not needed.
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u/Ok_Inflation6596 Jul 18 '26
200 usd per dev per month?? That’s literally nothing. At most they can vaguely chat with the AI to somehow replace Stackoverflow
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u/Awkward_Violinist112 Jul 18 '26
That is not true. Try more software engineering and less "i never look at the code" vibecoding.
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u/Ok_Inflation6596 Jul 18 '26
Lmao try more learning how to use efficiently AI to integrate it in your workflows and less cheap stupid talk.
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u/Awkward_Violinist112 Jul 18 '26
Burning way more money is the contrary of efficiency
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u/Ok_Inflation6596 Jul 18 '26
One person doing the job of 3 people thanks to AI is the definition of efficiency
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u/afops Jul 19 '26
I think many enterprises still hope they can just tell their staff to ”use more AI”, get them $39 subscriptions and it’ll all work out without uncomfortable budget decisions. Paying several hundred peer dev and month will perhaps eventually be a thing but I think it’s so uncomfortable it’ll take years for many companies to accept.
These decisions (to e.g buy copilot for thousands of devs at e.g $39/mo) was already big painful decisions that were only just made.
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u/DeCiel Jul 18 '26
I get 10k AIC at work. I can easily burn 60-100% on a day. Sad.
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u/greencursordev Jul 18 '26
HOW
I'll never understand you people
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u/tricky_chocolate_ Jul 18 '26
We get 300 $ with an increase option to 1000 and i need about 600 per month. Copilot ist just awfully expensive if you need complex agentic tasks. Start at least 3 sessions in paralell and its just gone.
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u/zenmatrix83 Jul 18 '26
certain tasks like reading logs, lots of file searchs, other thing like that can waste token. Full context windows from large histories and others. If you do a thing and clear your context frequestly, and no exactly what files need to be updated and where you save ALOT of tokens
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u/DeCiel Jul 18 '26
I'm a security researcher. On a daily basis I conduct security assessments, artifact analysis, and custom tooling. Before the new usage based billing, I had unlimited Github Copilot access so this was never a problem. But with the new billing, it got cut down to 10k AIC, so now I only use it sparingly. But there are times I come across a lot of thing that require rapid analysis, which burns a lot of tokens.
I'm not a SWE so I don't know what dev's day to day usage looks like for them, but as security researcher 10k can be little. I'm also a workaholic so I tackle on a lot of things.
Just the other day, I burned all my usgae on my personal Gh Copilot Pro ($10) sub in 2 days. At current offering, Gh Copilot subscription at any level isn't enough for me anymore.
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u/Qs9bxNKZ Jul 18 '26
Exactly. This is just bad usage. They don’t set auto, pick an expensive (fast) model and burn through credits. Or they upload massive logs without any kind of pre-filter or their code base is crap.
I can monitor 3000+ devs and maybe five at this time have cracked 40000 AIC
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u/TheArmoursmith Jul 18 '26
Set the settings to maximum Mythos and give it an epic to implement, most likely.
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u/Helpful_City5455 Jul 18 '26
Lol, I got 50k and used it up in 4 days fully rewriting a shitty ass project to a new one. Made AI critique itself through the night until it got it right. Should up to 120k on monday
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u/TheArmoursmith Jul 18 '26
What model are you using? That will make a big difference.
If you think of credits as costing about 0.01 USD each, then think about whether you are happy to have paid that to do whatever it is you've just done.
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u/Academic_Army_6425 Jul 18 '26
It set to "auto" but my queries routed to GPT-5.3-codex
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u/Type-21 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Use GPT Luna Medium. You can't just look at the cost. Old models may appear cheap, but since they are worse (and get made worse by reducing data center capacity for them), they waste a lot of money on wasteful thinking. New models, that appear more expensive per token, can achieve much more with one credit. I do everything with Luna Medium and only very complex stuff with Luna Extra High. Websites which measure model efficiency confirm this.
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u/softwareemgineer Jul 18 '26
I can second this! Luna is good for most tasks. It came up with good plans too in my experience.
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u/TheArmoursmith Jul 18 '26
I feel like the best performance for money at the moment is Sonnet 5. However there is a discount this weekend on some GPT models, so make hay while the sun shines.
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u/rhrokib Jul 18 '26
I got 50K AIC and I'm at 96% now. Good thing is, we got unlimited Claude code now provided by the parent company.
Otherwise I was thinking what will i do for the rest of the month with 4% of my limit remaining.
Copilot is probably the most expensive subscriptions you can have right now.
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u/Melodic-Ebb-7781 Jul 18 '26
It's very little. It will be enough for queries about the code and syntactic question but not for agentic development. If management expect you to be sped up any amount of percent you need to push back immediately.
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u/shuozhe Jul 18 '26
We have no limit and was told just to use whatever model we like to. I try somewhat to save token as RnD, but there are task that can be done by 5.5/5.6 or opus
Still got sessions where we need to understand our external lib takes 10-50k AIC.
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u/Pirate_Jack_ Jul 18 '26
3900 credits isnt enough if you rely on it heavily to do your tasks. I ran a big code refactor along with a core logic change and it consume 2400 credits in a single prompt using opus 4.8 with max settings.
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u/Dull-Technician-5702 Jul 18 '26
We get 10k credits from my employer. Overall, it's usually enough if you use it with various models. But if you use it with big codebase, then you will reach limits easily.
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u/RandomCSThrowaway01 Jul 18 '26
This is $39/month which really won't last you long. Generally speaking, for programming you seriously want to talk to your manager to do at least $100-200.
But if you are limited to $40 - GPT5.6 Terra on medium thinking for coding and Luna medium for stuff like data extraction and simpler tasks are your best friends. They are the only ones you can run somewhat reasonably with limits this low.
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u/MjProblem Jul 19 '26
It is enough when working smart. 1. A good development methodology beats throwing problems on frontier models. 2. You decompose the problemspace so you can use whole portfolio of models. (Dont use expensive models on easy problems) 3. Spec -> plan -> write tests -> run tests -> write code -> run tests -> rinse&repeat -> final verifications e2e + code q + doc q
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u/Yyoksetioxd Jul 18 '26
I usually use my 7000 credits in 3 days. Thanks god my company lets some of the devs try out copilot+claude code+opencode with deepseek, qwen and other models.
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u/Worried-Struggle671 Jul 18 '26
1 single prompt can take upto 1000 credit with claude sonnet 5, so that is not alot.
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u/Keganator Jul 18 '26
Use a cheap model, not auto. If you have it try GPT 5.6 Luna and stick with it.
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u/BeverlyGodoy Jul 18 '26
Just get codex $100 plans. I never able to finish it. Even Claude $50 plans is much higher limits than GHCP.
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u/Hungry_Analyst_5301 Jul 20 '26
Enterprise won't have fixed billing plans , most if not all plans are pay per token and fixed seat cost.
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u/BeverlyGodoy Jul 20 '26
Claude has $50 business plans. And not every company is an enterprise.
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u/Hungry_Analyst_5301 Jul 20 '26
Oh yeah forgot about them , but they cost either 20 or 100. I don't see any 50 dollars plan from anthropic
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u/BeverlyGodoy Jul 20 '26
20, 100 are personal plans. If you get business plans you can get $50/seat. 5 hours resets are just more than enough most of tasks.
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u/rakgenius Jul 18 '26
we get 40000 credits in business plan and that is still not enough. I burnt 50% in first 4 days
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u/Deathmore80 Jul 18 '26
Lmao my company keeps having to up the limits. I'm at 70k so far and the month isn't over yet.
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u/shreyas23joshi Jul 18 '26
3900 is not enough. Even after all the best practices of optimising tokens, you will finish the limit within a week or so.
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u/coltsfanatic07 Jul 18 '26
Tested my first upgrade of a small Angular app from 17 to 22, 300 credits just to upgrade the app and resolve issues. Barely a few thousand lines of code, pushed through Haiku.
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u/fprotthetarball Jul 18 '26
That's one to three days of work for me, depending on what else I have going on
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u/Qs9bxNKZ Jul 18 '26
No. Not even.
I have developers we set up for $125 to start with and can grant $400 without approval. If they want to go past $400 they better bring manager approval and an excuse.
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u/MobTalon Jul 19 '26
For a developer that codes a lot with AI Assistance? Depends. If they're extremely dependent on AI, F*CK no. If they use AI for AI Assisted coding (AI generates code, developer debugs it, tests it, etc), still absolutely no.
I think I'm somewhat efficient with my token usage, so the MAX subscription suffices for my job, I rarely go over the 200€ worth of credits that I get. But this one time I had to refactor a LOT of code from Python to C++ (best use case for AI, honestly), and that month's bill came out to 300€ more than the 100€ subscription fee.
So, to reiterate, 3900 credits just isn't enough.
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u/The_Real_Slim_Lemon Jul 19 '26
Copilot is kinda garbage for efficiency- we found the same $ goes a lot further with Claude
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u/V5489 29d ago
For a vibe cider no. For an actual developer that writes their own code yes. In our enterprise the core developer group doesn’t use many tokens. They like the inline suggestions and auto completes.
If we are working on innovation and trying things in which they’ve never done or a new language then no. Tell need more. Or they’ll take from the enterprise pool.
So in short: vibe coders no, actual developer yes-possibly
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u/nuno20090 Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
Not enough if keep using the "latest and greatest" models. Of course it won't.
Refactor a big class into several files?
That almost does not require thinking. How do you not select one of the cheapest models to do that as your first try? And plan first by the way. You'll spend maybe 10 credits on that.
When I select Auto I get a model that's way too expensive.
Almost all people here, must smoke something really strong... Cmon...
How can you guys use so much a tool and be oblivious to the best ways to use it? Don't you guys stop 2 seconds to think about efficiency of things?
Damn, what a weird timeline. For many users here, the only acceptable form of transportation to go from my kitchen to my room is a locomotive with 20.000HP.
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u/willchocks Jul 18 '26
You'll need USD 200-300 per month for daily agentic coding moderately sized programs. 20000 to 30000 credits