It is surprising how every other profession manages to pay for their work tools, only specific classes of software devs are so much against paying for anything, yet they will gladly have a means to also pay their own bills.
For me, it's due to the terrible process everywhere I've worked for getting approval to buy anything. In some cases, it's even against company policy to pay for a tool out of my own pocket. One product I needed was $10 but the person who was put in charge of all software purchasing decided to try to negotiate a site license with the vendor for a lower price and only for each seat used. She was basically trying to haggle over $10, on the off chance at some point in the future more people would want to use the tool and then the company could pay $8 or some other amount less than $10 per seat. It took months and the involvement of my manager, his manager, and a C level executive to get the $10 purchase approval to go through. I would have paid the $10 myself but that was a "zero tolerance" fireable offense.
I get why companies are concerned about having improperly licensed software on their machines, as the consequences can be great, but too many have gone too far in the opposite direction, making purchasing anything a long and convoluted process.
Seriously. Look at how much blowback $10/month for Github Copilot got. $10! I don't know everyone's financial status, but from where I'm sitting, $10/month for that is cheap.
It's about the value, not the cost. You can get VSCode for free, or JetBrains Professional IDEs for about $10/month (after 2nd year). People just don't agree that Copilot has value comparable to those yet.
All the comments I've read complaining about the price were saying basically that. One even explicitly said that if it was cheaper he'd buy it for fun, but since it provided no value, he wouldn't... just to get a thread of people complaining that the price shouldn't change his opinion.
Back of the envelope this though. Lets say a programmer makes $60/hr, or $120k/yr. Lets say Copilot replaces 5 minutes of googling around to find the right stack overflow answer and copy and paste and adapt it to fit. Copilot just has to do that twice in a whole month to be worth $10/month.
I don't disagree, but as I said, it's about comparative value to other tools. Any first world developer can afford $10/month.
That being said, if you are a full time employee you won't magically earn an extra $10 a month for using Copilot, you will only be more productive. It will benefit your employer and Copilot doesn't have an enterprise subscription yet.
I think it’s largely because copilot is hardly worth it to use for free. I found it to provide negative value and waste my time with its correct looking but ultimately incorrect suggestions.
