All posts tagged: devs

‘What a joke’: Github Copilot’s new token-based billing spurs consternation among devs

‘What a joke’: Github Copilot’s new token-based billing spurs consternation among devs

The golden age of Microsoft’s Github Copilot appears to be at an end — for the little guy, at least. The company is switching its billing system from a flat subscription rate to a token-usage system that has the potential to bill users at a significantly higher rate. Bigger enterprises may still have the juice for it, but smaller companies and workers could find themselves wondering how they’re supposed to balance the monthly budget. The changes, which will take place June 1, mean that users will charged based on how many tokens they burn through as they work instead of a low flat rate based on requests. Some developers with financial whiplash have taken to places like Reddit and X to bemoan what — in many cases — appears to be a drastic escalation in cost. “What a joke,” one Redditor recently wrote, claiming that, while they currently only pay around $29 per month, the new rate will balloon their costs to nearly $750 a month. “This new usage model is just stupidly expensive. I’m adjusting …

CopilotKit raises M to help devs deploy app-native AI agents

CopilotKit raises $27M to help devs deploy app-native AI agents

Many companies today provide AI simply as a chatbot inside their apps: you type in (or dictate) what you want it to do, and the AI bot goes and tries to do it. Still, the experience tends to feel clunky. A text-based UI doesn’t always translate to a smooth experience, for example, if you want to use a travel app to book an entire itinerary but have to scan through reams of text. According to the founders of CopilotKit, that approach doesn’t make the most of what AI agents and LLMs can do. The company’s co-founders, Atai Barkai (pictured above, right) and Uli Barkai (pictured above, left), believe the way forward is to enable agents to live inside applications, understand what users are doing, take actions, and show useful interfaces instead of just returning long blocks of text. The company’s popular AG-UI protocol is aimed at the first part of that solution. The widely adopted, open-source protocol standardizes how AI agents connect to and communicate with user interfaces (like a web browser or an app), …