GitHub Models Is Dead and Willison Names the Cause: Coding Agents Made Subsidized Token Access Impossible

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GitHub fully retired GitHub Models on July 30 — playground, model catalog, inference API and bring-your-own-key endpoints all removed — and gave no public reason. Willison's Aug 9 read is that agentic usage patterns made free or subsidized tokens prohibitively expensive, which is the same force behind Copilot's shift to pay-per-credit billing at $0.01/credit. He migrated his own workflow to OpenAI's API with hard spending limits; the broader pattern for builders is that free model on-ramps are consolidating behind subscriptions and enterprise agreements, and depending on one is now a migration risk.