Marv's Blog

Claude vs GitHub Copilot pricing and limits

For the month of March, I decided to dive deeper into the wild ocean that is agentic coding. I have been a big fan of the code completions that GitHub Copilot provided in its early versions (and was even an early adopter of TabNine), but was a bit hesitant to hand over the wheel entirely and essentially become a backseat-developer. Being in full control of the code is what I always enjoyed in this hobby and craft.

So while I don't write any code at work anymore, the spark is still bright and I wanted to see what I can achieve with the new tools when I am not writing code, but rather "orchestrating" it.

I have opted for one month of Claude Pro to use Claude Code with my personal browser game project. While I do not consider myself an experienced prompt engineer, I do try to keep context small. Nevertheless, I kept burning through Claude's usage limits like they were nothing. Their session limit does not allow any serious coding session and their weekly limit will disappear quickly if you are regularly hitting the session cap. Claude Pro does not cost a lot of money, but I do not feel that I get my money's worth out of it.

In comparison, my existing GitHub Copilot pricing and limits seem to be a lot more forgiving. They charge you for what they call premium requests. While strictly defined in the provided link, I find it hard to track what seems to be premium and what is not, because the count of premium requests does not rise as quickly as my usage in Claude.

When hitting limits, both platforms allow you to pay per additional request. Claude's approach sticks with the regular usage here as well: You seem to keep burning through their credits like it is nothing. I paid 10 Euro to get some over-limit usage and quickly realized that this wouldn't last me long.

Copilot on the other hand charges 0.04 Euro per premium request, which do not rack up quickly.

While this was no thorough research, my personal observation is clear: Claude will charge me for anything, fast and with little transparency. Copilot will charge me for something, a bit more transparent and with pricing in my favor.

For now, I am not going to pay for another month of Claude Pro but rather invest a few extra Euros with GitHub when hitting my limits.