GitHub Copilot is not worth $10/month
TL;DR; it’s worth more than $100/month for most developers.
GitHub Copilot was announced in June 2021 as a technical preview product. It promised to change how developers worked by suggesting the next line of code to write or the content of entire functions. It was also said that Copilot would learn from how you write code, constantly becoming a more adept development partner.
I signed up to join the waiting list almost instantly.
I was accepted to the technical preview in February 2022, sceptical of the difference that Copilot would bring over other autocomplete functionality I used in other development environments. I was utterly blown away by the difference!
Not only was Copilot making suggestions for boilerplate code but it was also writing entirely unique functions and methods in MY style. Copilot had obviously taken a long, hard look at my commit history and was tailoring its suggestions to be almost exactly what I would have written.
I decided to write this article after my daily curated email from Medium included the title “Copilot is NOT worth $10 a month”. I opened that article fully expecting to find an article very much like this one, opining that the productivity benefits of Copilot far outweigh the $10/month price tag. I was wrong and the article argues that Copilot is not a cost-effective purchase yet.
Maybe they ran into too many bad suggestions like this one…
I argue Copilot is worth MORE than $10 per month
GitHub Copilot is already increasing my productivity by around 20% in 3 key ways:
- It does the work for me
- It lowers my cognitive load
- It keeps me in the IDE more
I’ll explore these points in more detail below.
Reason 1: It does the work for me
Good development is planning out what you’re going to do in advance. Part of the planning process for me is to create the JSDoc comment block before each function that needs documentation. These comment blocks help me when I am writing my code by showing me the syntax for each function I call.
Amazingly, they also allow Copilot to create the entire function for me within 3 seconds, populated with error checking, error handling, calls to the backend API, and correctly transformed return values based on the comment block
GitHub Copilot has clearly learnt my coding style from reviewing the code I have written in this project and other projects. It literally wrote exactly what I wanted in 3 seconds rather than 10 minutes. By the way, this isn’t some cherry-picked example that works, this is literally how I work for 70–80% of my new functions on every project.
Not only can Copilot write the code for me, but it has also got to the point where it will now accurately suggest the next line of my JSDoc comment block based on how I write code
My consultancy bills by the project. If things take less time, we can do more work in a month, increasing the revenue per month and profit margin per project at the same time. Already you can probably see that $10/month is absolutely worth spending for our team (we actually buy the $100/year subscription to save $20/year).
Bottom Line: If you’re billing for your time, I think you will save more than $10/month of billable hours a month with Copilot.
Reason 2: It lowers my cognitive load
Maybe it’s just me, but I only have so many tasks I can complete each day that require a high degree of thought; coding is one of those tasks that uses a huge amount of my thought quota. At some point in the day, my brain will say:
That’s enough, no more coding today! I want to do something else!
This is where Copilot really shines for me. I can write way more code in a day than without my AI companion because of all the autocompletion it will do for me. I finish my work quicker, with way more mental capacity to do things with my family and friends, and the energy to spend time on my other hobbies. Previously I would have collapsed in front of the sofa and avoided anything that involved complex thinking because my brain just couldn’t handle it.
On top of the increased revenue I talked about in reason 1, I also going to get a better quality of life from paying for Copilot than I would otherwise have. How much are those extra hours with your partner/children/pets/friends worth after work? To me, a lot more than $10/month.
Bottom Line: Even if you’re a hobby developer, the mental and time benefits of Copilot are worth the price for me.
Reason 3: It keeps me in the IDE more
As a developer, I want to spend as much time writing code as possible. Anything that takes me out of the IDE to do research is going to impact the time spent writing code and can also lead to distractions.
If I forget how to join two arrays together in Javascript because I have been writing Python for a week, I have to switch to the browser window, open a new tab, search for “join two arrays in javascript”, click on the link that looks more promising, then copy the answer into my code. That is a lot of steps to be reminded that you need the concat method.
Copilot keeps me in the IDE by doing all the searching for me in the background. I don’t need to leave VSCode at all to join two arrays because I can just write a comment with the name of the two arrays I want to join and Copilot will write the next line of code for me.
By being kept in VSCode I have avoided a potential distraction from notifications, emails, and live chat. I have also achieved exactly the same task more quickly while keeping my development “flow state”.
Bottom Line: Copilot indirectly increases your productivity by removing distractions outside your IDE.
Summary
I’ve outlined the three main reasons I think GitHub Copilot is worth its current price and why I think the value to you will be significantly higher than the cost.
Talent.com says that developers in the UK are paid, on average, around £78,000/year. If these developers were all achieving a 10% productivity improvement, they could work 200 fewer hours a year, or bill for £7,800 extra over the same time period.
OK, but the UK is a high-wage country, what about the rest of the world? Upwork suggests $15-$30 per hour for a developer, meaning Copilot costs less than one hour of development work anywhere in the world, 0.05% of a developer's earnings. For me, Copilot is absolutely the right decision for any developer.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that Copilot is absolutely worth the price that GitHub is asking. If I haven’t, I’d love to know in the comments what you think Copilot is lacking. If you’re still on the fence, you can get the 60-day free trial of Copilot to find out if it will work for you.
