These users — much like the users of effectively every subsidized AI subscription — never really knew how much anything they did cost, because Microsoft intentionally hid the actual cost of prompts and allowed users to spend obscene amounts as a way of boosting growth for GitHub Copilot.

Not even close to just microsoft… I’ve tried probably most products by now, and almost all them obfuscate the token and monetary cost of each prompt and each prompt’s actions. Then even after you understand that you’re going to have and credits and multiple layers of quotas/ratelimits, you rarely have any idea of how many credits a prompt is going to want to use. You can get anything from a whole task complete for 0.33 credits to 30 credits blasted on something that doesn’t work.