GitHub's Copilot AI for Business now available for $19/month
Published in 2023, this chronicle by @thoughtpeddler details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $19/month.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 10 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 7 comments
Copilot for Visual Studio (i.e. not VS Code) is horribly broken, and even at $10/month it wasn't worth it, let alone $19/month. Considering that Visual Studio is used by enterprises mostly, I don't know how many will jump into this $19/month subscription until the product is much, much, better.
It isn't the "AI" side that is broken. It is just a buggy extension, crashes constantly, and even when it does give suggestions it takes far too long to do so harming your workflow. Check out the less than 2.5 star average reviews on the VS Marketplace:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=GitHub.copilotvs&ssr=false#review-details
Honestly if you're a Visual Studio developer, I'd say ChatGPT Plus for $20/month is better value than Copilot in its current form which is should be free while they iron out all the bugs. Or if you REALLY want to use Copilot, then you'll need to switch to VS Code instead since the extension in that at least works correctly.
Why is it ~twice as expensive as a per-user license? Right now we just reimburse our analysts/developers the $10/month for the Copilot fees. I see no reason to go to a more expensive plan just so we can manage their licenses.
The following add-ons for an additional $108/year per person don't seem worth it at all. [0]
-Simple license management (what's simpler than reimbursing personal expenses?)
-Organization-wide policy management (huh?)
-Industry-leading privacy (no idea what this means, how is this better than personal Copilot per person)
-Corporate proxy support (what even is this)
EDIT: How do you do single line breaks on HN, anyway? Markdown doesn't work (two spaces or backslashes) and the help docs don't specify:
https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
[0]: Plus, the individuals don't get their credit card rewards. Employees love expensing things for free rewards.
I'm curious to hear how others have found Copilot?
I've been using it the last few weeks and I find it kind of marginal in value.
It was quite helpful with filling out some kubernetes type details and it makes some decent guesses when declaring constants. I also had it rewrite a line of code to order keys in a string.
Otherwise I find you really have to keep an eye on what it's doing - even simple things like function invocations it can get wrong e.g. incorrect arguments being passed to a method (where argument types aren't even matching).
Also I guess results depend on the language - I tried to get it to write a simple golang http server with a handler and couldn't figure out how to prompt it to write one.
I'm actually looking forward to a better Gopilot. It seems like doomsdayers do well in getting publicity, but to me it feels more like a refactoring tool that can help to speed up the development process (and teach me a few things along the way).
On the one hand the business case is easy to make as it makes me at least $500/month more productive than without CoPilot, on the other hand I don't see why someone would use CoPilot for Business over the individual version.
I’m curious if enterprise customers would have license concerns about the code produced from using this.
Have any big companies set policies on employees using these kind of tools? Do they allow them?