I read the TechCrunch piece with the headline “‘What a joke’: GitHub Copilot’s new token-based billing spurs consternation among devs,” and the part that stuck with me wasn’t the anger. It was how predictable it felt. Copilot started as a flat subscription, the kind you forget you’re paying for, and now it meters tokens, which means the more useful it becomes the more it costs you per keystroke.

Developers noticed. The thread filled up with people doing the math on their own usage and not liking the answer.

The meter is the product now

Here is what changed. The original deal was simple: pay a fixed amount, use it as much as you want, the cost of the model is GitHub’s problem. Usage-based billing inverts that. Now the cost of the model is your problem, and GitHub sits in the middle deciding the exchange rate between your work and your bill.

That middle position is the whole business. When a tool resells you model access, it buys tokens wholesale and sells them to you at whatever margin it can defend. You never see the wholesale number. You just see your invoice climb in a month where you happened to lean on the autocomplete a lot, and you have no way to audit whether the climb was fair.

And the unpredictability is the part that actually breaks people’s trust. A flat bill you can budget around. A metered bill that spikes when you’re heads-down shipping feels like getting punished for using the thing as intended.

Who’s holding the key

There’s a different model that’s been sitting in plain view, and developers who run their own API keys already know it.

You can pay your LLM provider directly. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, whoever. You generate a key, you watch your usage on their dashboard, you pay their published per-token rate with nobody skimming the difference. This is bring-your-own-key, BYOK, and it’s been the quiet default for people who got tired of subscription roulette. I wrote more about why the markup matters in AI Data Mining Makes BYOK Essential, but the pricing argument is almost simpler than the privacy one: when you hold the key, there is no middleman to mark anything up, because you are buying straight from the source at the source’s price, and the tool sitting on top of that relationship has nothing left to meter.

So the question stops being “what’s this tool’s token rate” and becomes “do I even need a tool that has a token rate.”

A browser agent that doesn’t sell tokens

Most of this debate happens inside the code editor, but the same trap is everywhere AI tools live now, including the browser. A lot of browser agents route every action through their servers and bill you for the privilege, which is just Copilot’s meter wearing a different hat.

Dassi takes the BYOK route instead. It’s a Chrome extension that lives in your side panel, sees the page you’re looking at, and helps with the dull browser work: drafting the reply, filling the form, pulling the data out of a dashboard that has no export button. The agent itself is free. You connect your own API key, or you sign in with the ChatGPT subscription you already pay for, and the only AI cost in the whole arrangement is the one you’d be paying your provider anyway. If you want the walkthrough on the ChatGPT-login path, it’s in Already Paying for ChatGPT? Here’s How to Make It Work in Your Browser.

No per-token surprise. No exchange rate you can’t see. Your provider charges you, and that’s the end of the chain.

Free isn’t the impressive part

Plenty of tools are free until they aren’t. The free trial, the freemium tier, the generous limits that quietly tighten once you’re locked in. I’m skeptical of free by default.

What’s different about BYOK isn’t the price tag. It’s that the economic relationship runs directly between you and the model maker, with no party in the middle whose revenue depends on you using more tokens than you meant to. Copilot’s incentive, structurally, is now for you to consume. A tool that doesn’t resell tokens has no such incentive, because it isn’t in the token business at all.

Where this goes

The Copilot backlash will fade, GitHub will tweak the tiers, somebody will write a thread about how it’s actually fine now. That’s the usual arc.

But the underlying shift won’t reverse. As model costs become the dominant line item in every AI tool, more of them will want to meter you, and more of them will discover that developers can read a pricing page. Bringing your own key was a power-user habit for a long time. It’s starting to look like plain self-defense.

You can grab dassi from the Chrome Web Store and point it at whatever key you’ve already got. Worst case, you’ve spent nothing, which is more than I can say for last month’s Copilot bill.