--- title: "🤑 The One Where Your Tokens Have a Price Tag" date: 2026-05-02 author: Andrea Griffiths language: en issue: 25 excerpt: "GitHub Copilot is switching to usage-based billing. Here's what changes, what stays free, and how to keep your spend in check." tags: ["copilot", "pricing", "newsletter"] canonical_url: https://mainbranch.beehiiv.com/p/506cf95d-8d2e-4be1-8546-bbb802993669 --- Hiya friends, Your Copilot tokens are now cash. Also launching a writing contest this week, details at the bottom. ## 🚢 What Shipped **GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based billing on [June 1](https://github.blog/changelog/2026-04-27-github-copilot-code-review-will-start-consuming-github-actions-minutes-on-june-1-2026/)** Premium Request Units are gone. GitHub AI Credits are in. Starting June 1, every token you send (input, output, cached) gets billed at published API rates per model. Your plan price stays the same. What you get for it doesn't. Code completions stay free. Everything else (chat, code review, agents) costs credits now. The thing to know: output tokens cost 5x more than input. So the fastest win is tightening your output. Add "Code only, no explanation" to your Copilot instructions. Set your format to bullets over paragraphs. Prune your copilot-instructions.md and AGENTS.md: every extra word runs on every call. Use Ask Mode for simple tasks. Agent Mode burns fast. I'm working on a full article about this. More soon. **🧰 TanStack AI: Now with Native Audio Generation** Fresh drop from the TanStack crew: their open-source AI library now sings, literally. With the new generateAudio API you can compose music, fire up text-to-speech, and even handle sound effects with a single set of type-safe hooks. Providers? Pick Fal, Gemini Lyria, whatever's hot this week, and boom: it works. Docs and code are up: [https://tanstack.com/blog/tanstack-ai-audio-generation](https://tanstack.com/blog/tanstack-ai-audio-generation) ## 📺 What I'm Watching [MCP vs. the CLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfITzVcUkZA): a head-to-head evaluation of agent tool integration patterns (Laurie Voss, Arize AI) 500 evals. One GitHub repo. 25 tasks. Three strategies: the official GitHub MCP server, a long encyclopedic gh skill, and a short opinionated one. Correctness was ~82% across all of them. But on the hardest tasks, MCP cost 6x more and ran 5x longer. One run hit 71 tool calls, 8 minutes, and $2. It's not MCP vs CLI. It's MCP plus CLI. Use the right one for the job. Short opinionated skills beat long ones every time. Worth your time if: you're building agents or wondering why your costs keep climbing. ## 🔧 What I'm Using Reflections (end of FY evaluations) were due this week. My office has never been cleaner. I will do anything and everything before sitting down to write about myself. The aversion is real. I write poetry for peer reviews. My own? Ew. 💡 Good timing then that a colleague built a GitHub CLI tool that pulls your GitHub activity for a review period, reads your org chart, and drafts your performance reflection in your own voice (you can 100% use the CLI to do this for yourself). Shoutout to [@ashleywolf](https://x.com/ashleywolf) for this one. Also: I always forget how much I've shipped until I add it all up. That part is always a good surprise. ## ✨ This Week It's been a rough week for GitHub. When you're a high-agency person, you feel everything, even the things that aren't yours to carry. When that's the only conversation happening, it gets heavy. Not going to lie, I hate it. So I'm focusing on what I can control. Writing this newsletter is one of those things. If you're reading these words, thank you. I want to grow this into something meaningful for more people than just me. Which is why I'm launching a Main Branch writing contest. I want to hear from you, your workflows, your fundamentals, the things that actually changed how you ship. All the details: [Main Branch Writing Contest](https://acolombiadev.zo.space/contest). Can't wait to see what you submit. With gratitude, Andrea P.S.: how cool is this conference badge from [Nerdearla](https://nerdearla.com/en/). I still have my first security clearance application, my college thesis, and one labeled photo folder (probably holding three photos) all stuffed in my old cables-and-things box. ![Nerdearla conference badge](/images/nerdearla-badge.jpg)