GitHub is making its AI programming Copilot free for VS Code developers
- The GitHub Copilot free tier now integrates directly into VS Code
- The limits include 2,000 monthly code completions and 50 chats
- GitHub now supports 150 million developers on its platform
The Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub has confirmed it will offer a free version of its Copilot AI assistant to all developers using the VS Code IDE.
Until now, Copilot was only available for free to verified students, teachers, and open source administrators, with developers who did not qualify for free access having to pay a monthly subscription for one of three tiers to access the tool.
Anyone familiar with the way the platform has functioned won’t be surprised by the change. CEO Thomas Dohmke explained: “GitHub has a long history of offering free products and services to developers.”
GitHub Copilot now free for VS Code
Previous products and tools made available for free include open source and public collaboration, private repositories, minutes for GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces, and package and release repositories.
GitHub Copilot Free is now available directly within VS Code and provides access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. To access the AI tool, users must log in with their personal GitHub account.
Users can also choose between OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which powers the version of ChatGPT that many developers use, or Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
GitHub Copilot Free includes most of the features of the Pro tier, the version that is free for students and teachers. The free version does without summaries for pull requests, issues and discussions, among other things.
Anyone who isn’t an open source maintainer or isn’t training will have to pay $10/month for Pro, which completely removes code completion and message restrictions.
More broadly, Github Copilot is also available for other popular IDEs such as Visual Studio, JetBrains IDE, Neovim, and Azure Data Studio. Despite the platform’s connection with Microsoft, you can also use the AI assistant in Apple’s Xcode.
At the same time, Dohmke announced a new milestone of 150 million developers on GitHub. The Microsoft-owned platform is now said to have annual revenues of $2 billion.