joe curlee

GitHub Copilot recently overhauled its pricing structure, shifting from a predictable flat-rate model to token-metered billing. The reality is that GitHub was likely operating at a massive loss by allowing users to run advanced AI coding agents—capable of generating vast amounts of work—for a flat fee of just $39 per month on a Pro+ account.

Before this change, developers like myself could easily put top-tier models like GPT-5.4 Thinking on autopilot. But under the new usage-based metrics, the math has drastically changed. Using GitHub’s own analysis tools, I calculated that doing the exact same amount of work today would cost me approximately $1,500 per month.

I can't afford a $1,500 monthly API bill, so I immediately researched my next best option: DeepSeek-V4-Pro and V4-Flash. By hosting on DeepSeek’s own servers and utilizing prompt caching, the operational cost drops to about one-tenth of OpenAI’s rates. Suddenly, we are back in the $50-a-month range.

But there is a massive catch. By using DeepSeek, your code is processed on servers subject to Chinese state law—most notably the National Intelligence Law, which requires companies to cooperate with state intelligence operations.

The Chinese government heavily subsidizes its tech and energy sectors, artificially driving down the cost of running AI models. While this makes their tools incredibly cheap for global consumers, it also serves as a vacuum to ingest US tech, workflows, and proprietary data. Small to mid-sized developers are now left with three agonizing choices: give up on agentic AI entirely, drain your savings to afford American models, or hand your codebase over to China.

If the United States wants to keep its economy and tech sector competitive, we cannot rely on private enterprise alone to absorb the monumental cost of compute. The US must offer comparable, state-backed infrastructure initiatives that drive down AI costs for developers, but firmly rooted in the consumer protection and data privacy laws the world expects from us. It is the only way to beat China at this game without sacrificing the intellectual property of everyday developers.

• AI
• websites
• web development
• economy