- GitHub Copilot free tier now integrates directly into VS Code
- Limits include 2,000 monthly code completions and 50 chats.
- GitHub now supports 150 million developers on its platform
Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub has confirmed that 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 students, teachers, and verified open source maintainers, and developers who were not eligible for free access had to pay a monthly subscription for one of three tiers to access the tool.
Anyone familiar with the way the platform has worked 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 that have been available for free include open source and crowdsourcing, private repositories, minutes for GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces, and package and version storage.
Free GitHub Copilot is now available directly in VS Code and includes access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. Access to the AI tool requires users to sign in with their personal GitHub account.
Users will also be able to choose between OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which powers the version of ChatGPT used by many developers, or Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
GitHub Copilot free includes most of the features found in the Pro level, which is the free version for students and teachers. The free version gets by without pull request summaries, issues, and discussions, among a few other things.
Anyone who isn’t an open source maintainer or in education will need to pay $10 a month for Pro, which completely removes code completion and messaging limitations.
More generally, Github Copilot is also available in other popular IDEs, such as Visual Studio, JetBrains IDE, Neovim, and Azure Data Studio. Despite the platform’s affiliation 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 an annual revenue rate of $2 billion.
