I nervously hover over the VSCode Copilot icon, watching the premium requests slowly accumulate. It’s not an enjoyable experience (whether you know how much you've used or not :) )
Unless you use "free" GPT 4.1 like MS wants you (not the same as Claude, even with Beast Mode). And how long is that going to be free, because it feels like a design to simply push you to a MS product (MS>OpenAI) instead of third party.
So what happens a year from now? Paid GPT 5.1? With 4.1 being removed? If it was not for the insane prices of actual large mem GPUs and the slowness of large models, i will be using LLMs at home. Right now MS/Antropic/OpenAI are right in that zone where its not too expensive yet to go full local LLM.