Your AI Coding Bill Is About to Explode

GitHub Copilot is switching from flat-rate to per-token AI Credits on June 1st — and if you're using agents like Cursor or Claude Code, your bill could jump 5-10x. The GitHub Copilot vs Claude pricing shift means agentic coding sessions that cost pennies under the old model now burn real money at GPT-5.5's $30/million token rate.

GitHub Copilot's weekly costs nearly doubled since January as agentic workflows consumed 10-100x more tokens than simple autocomplete. Under the new AI Credits model, code completion stays free but chat and agent sessions are billed per token at model-specific rates — GPT-5.4 Mini at $4.50/million vs GPT-5.5 at $30/million output tokens. Anthropic is rationing Claude Code access during peak hours and removing volume discounts. The optimization: route cheap models for routine work, expensive models only for hard problems — 80% capability at 20% cost.

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