FWIW, the former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman claims this is false and that Copilot was profitable. He was CEO at the time Copilot was getting started, but left in late 2021. So, it’s possible that costs have increased >3x since then, though unless they’re constantly using GPT-4 under the hood, I would be surprised to learn that.
Others have speculated that maybe Copilot loses money on average because it’s made available to free for students (among others), and free users heavily outweigh paying users. The WSJ article said that:
the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.
Which doesn’t exactly say that the median user is unprofitable.
On the other hand, Microsoft 365 Copilot is planned to cost $30, conveniently exactly $20 more than the $10 GitHub Copilot costs per month, so perhaps there is something to the figure.
FWIW, the former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman claims this is false and that Copilot was profitable. He was CEO at the time Copilot was getting started, but left in late 2021. So, it’s possible that costs have increased >3x since then, though unless they’re constantly using GPT-4 under the hood, I would be surprised to learn that.
Others have speculated that maybe Copilot loses money on average because it’s made available to free for students (among others), and free users heavily outweigh paying users. The WSJ article said that:
Which doesn’t exactly say that the median user is unprofitable.
On the other hand, Microsoft 365 Copilot is planned to cost $30, conveniently exactly $20 more than the $10 GitHub Copilot costs per month, so perhaps there is something to the figure.