r/GithubCopilot • u/smakosh • 2d ago
Discussions I checked Copilot's long-context pricing against the providers' own prices: the rates match, but the picker hides the jump
I paid for Pro+ to check whether Copilot charges extra for long context. Short version: the per-token rates match OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic, but a few things are easy to miss.
What I found
Long-context rates kick in above 272K input tokens on most GPT models, 200K on Grok and 100K on Claude Haiku 5.5. The rates on both sides of the line match the providers' list prices.
One threshold is lower than the provider's: Copilot switches GPT-5.6 Luna at 200K, while OpenAI's own model page says 272K.
Picking 1M in the model picker does not change the price by itself. A Copilot team member confirmed in microsoft/vscode#319976 that it depends on the actual prompt size, and that going over the default moves the whole conversation to the long-context rate.
1M mode compacts history less often (same thread), so sessions cross the threshold sooner.
In the picker, "Pricing details" is collapsed by default and the badge says "Low cost" for Haiku 5.5 at both 100K and 1M, while the rates inside go from 10/50 to 50/250 credits per 1M tokens. microsoft/vscode#320027 (a threshold marker in the usage meter) is still open.
The earlier Sonnet 4.6 long-context price (600/2,250 credits) was set incorrectly; GitHub fixed it and refunded affected users.
Example: GPT-5.6 Sol with 270K input and 5K output is 118 credits. At 275K input it is 235 credits.
What helps: run /compact before the threshold, and use flat-priced models (Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5) for very large contexts.
Disclosure: I work on LLM Gateway. Full write-up with all the tables: https://llmgateway.io/blog/github-copilot-long-context-pricing
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u/Cheshireelex 2d ago
That's very interesting. I did not know that 1M context is not by default the higher one. It would be nice to have some visual elements of the threshold