GitHub Copilot provides a range of credit-based plans starting at $10 per month, scaling up to $100 for the Max tier. Tabnine centers its offering on two primary annual subscriptions at $39 and $59 per seat, which include unlimited usage for teams utilizing their own on-premise or cloud LLM endpoints.
From a procurement standpoint, the choice depends on your infrastructure preference. Tabnine offers fixed costs for private model usage, while GitHub utilizes a system of base credits and flex allotments across its Pro, Pro+, and Max tiers.
Break-even value per seat
| Plan |
Price / seat / month |
Hours to break even at $50/h |
Hours to break even at $75/h |
Hours to break even at $100/h |
| Tabnine — Tabnine Code Assistant |
$39 |
0.8 h |
0.5 h |
0.4 h |
| Tabnine — The Tabnine Agentic Platform |
$59 |
1.2 h |
0.8 h |
0.6 h |
Break-even hours = seat price ÷ loaded hourly cost. Each seat pays for itself once it saves that much verified time per month.
How do the credit allotments work in GitHub Copilot?
GitHub Copilot pricing is structured around monthly credits. The $10 Pro plan includes $10 in base credits and $5 in flex allotment. This scales to the $100 Max plan, which provides $100 in base credits and a matching $100 flex allotment. Organizations requiring centralized management must contact sales for Business or Enterprise pricing.
When does Tabnine become the more cost-effective choice?
Tabnine's value is highest for organizations that have already invested in their own LLM infrastructure. Both the $39 Code Assistant and $59 Agentic Platform plans allow for unlimited usage when connected to your own LLM endpoint. This eliminates the uncertainty of credit allotments found in the GitHub model.
To determine if these tools provide a net return, finance leaders should track the 'Break-even hours'—the specific amount of time a developer must save to cover the seat cost. Using NetLift, you can compare the monthly subscription fee against the loaded hourly cost of your engineering team. For instance, at a $75/hour loaded rate, a Tabnine Agentic Platform seat pays for itself after saving 48 minutes of work per month.
Sources
All pricing on this page comes from official vendor pages: