GitHub Launches Free Version of Copilot AI Assistant for Developers

GitHub launches Copilot for free: AI code autocompletion for all users - Softonic

GitHub, the corporate development platform owned by Microsoft, announced on Wednesday that Copilot, its AI-assisted programming tool, will have a free version. This will also be available by default in the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor, one of the most popular among developers. Until now, Copilot required a monthly payment of at least $10, except for students, teachers, and verified open-source maintainers, who had free access. The CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, explained in an interview with TechCrunch that this decision is part of the evolution towards a more accessible GitHub. "My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories," he commented. "Then, in 2020, we launched free private organizations and GitHub Actions entitlements. It felt natural to reach the point of also offering a completely free Copilot, not just for students and open-source maintainers." The free version is designed for occasional use and has certain limitations. Users will be able to access 2,000 code autocompletions per month and, although the AI models Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Anthropic) and GPT-4o (OpenAI) can be used, the platform reserves other more advanced options for paid plans. In the case of Copilot Chat, up to 50 messages per month are allowed. However, users will have access to all Copilot extensions and skills. Dohmke emphasized that the goal of this strategy is to expand GitHub's global reach and reduce economic barriers, especially in countries where average incomes make it difficult to access tools like Copilot. "We want to enable a billion people to become developers worldwide," he noted. Additionally, the CEO hopes that this initiative will make Copilot more popular among students, who will no longer have to validate their academic status. The move comes at a time when competition in the AI-assisted programming tools market is increasing, including GitHub rivals like Tabnine, Qodo, and AWS. By betting on a freemium model and leveraging the wide distribution of VS Code, GitHub's intention is to maintain its leadership and continue making access to AI-assisted programming more accessible.

GitHub is making its AI programming Copilot free for VS Code developers

Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub has confirmed it will be offering a free version of its Copilot AI assistant for all developers using the VS Code IDE. Until now, Copilot was only available for free to verified students, teachers and open-source maintainers, with developers who weren't eligible for free access having to pay a monthly subscription for one of three levels to access the tool. Anyone familiar with the way the platform has operated won't be surprised at the change. CEO Thomas Dohmke explained: "GitHub has a long history of offering free products and services to developers." Previous products and tools that have been made available for free include open source and public collaboration, private repos, minutes for GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces, and package and release storage. GitHub Copilot free is now available directly within 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 choice 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 functionalities that the Pro tier has, which is the version that's free for students and teachers. The free version makes do without summaries for pull requests, issues and discussions, among a few other things. Anybody who isn't an open-source maintainer or in education will need to pay $10/month for Pro, which removes the code completion and message limitations entirely. More broadly, Github Copilot is also available across other popular IDEs, like 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 run rate of $2 billion.

GitHub is making its AI programming Copilot free for VS Code developers -- with limits

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Microsoft code repository subsidiary GitHub has announced the launch of GitHub Copilot Free, an accessible version of its popular AI-powered coding assistant, now integrated directly into the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) integrated developer environment (IDE). Recall that Github first launched its version of Copilot based on OpenAI's Codex code completion model back in 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, and has steadily updated it since. The new free tier for VS Code aims to expand the AI-powered code completion assistant's reach to a broader audience of developers -- namely, those with only light usage needs and tighter budgets. This announcement coincides with GitHub surpassing the milestone of 150 million developers on its platform. According to CEO Thomas Dohmke, this move builds on GitHub's history of providing free tools to the developer community. Previously, GitHub offered free repositories, CI/CD minutes, and Codespaces. Copilot Free adds another layer to these offerings, aimed at casual users or smaller-scale projects. Copilot Free also comes after Github already free, unlimited access to the more fully featured and less limited Copilot Pro ($10 USD per month per seat) to students, educators, and open-source maintainers. The company says it will continue to offer Copilot Pro for free to these users. Features of GitHub Copilot Free GitHub Copilot Free provides users with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, accessible by signing in with a personal GitHub account. The service leverages advanced AI models, including Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. These models enable developers to seek help with coding questions, debug existing code, or implement edits across multiple files. However, for those seeking to use premium AI models such as Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview, they'll need to turn to the Pro and other paid plans. The new free tier includes: * Multi-file Editing: Users can make changes across multiple files via Copilot Edits, which combines conversational chat with code generation. * Terminal Assistance: Copilot can interpret errors, fix failed commands, and even suggest shell scripts through terminal chat. * Custom Instructions: Developers can define coding preferences at the project or editor level, ensuring consistent code generation tailored to specific frameworks or guidelines. * Voice Commands: A built-in speech interface allows users to interact with Copilot hands-free, using voice commands to prototype apps or debug code. * Project Context Awareness: Copilot's AI participants can provide assistance based on a comprehensive understanding of an entire codebase. Availability and Future Plans GitHub Copilot Free is available immediately in VS Code and GitHub.com. Developers only need a GitHub account to get started. In addition to these offerings, GitHub is previewing an advanced feature called Vision Copilot. This tool enables developers to generate user interfaces from screenshots or markup, streamlining the design-to-code workflow. While still in preview, Vision Copilot requires users to supply their own API key for access to AI services. A Commitment to Developer Empowerment GitHub's introduction of Copilot Free reflects its ongoing commitment to empowering developers. As part of the announcement, Dohmke highlighted the company's mission to lower barriers for the global developer community. The free tier complements a growing suite of AI-powered tools integrated into VS Code, offering practical solutions for everyday challenges like debugging, naming conventions, and commit message generation. For those interested in exploring the capabilities of GitHub Copilot Free, the service can be enabled directly in VS Code or accessed via the GitHub dashboard.

GitHub launches a free version of its Copilot | TechCrunch

Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft's popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access. GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023. "My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019," GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday's announcement. "Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open source maintainers." There are some limitations to the free version, which is geared toward occasional users, not major work on a big project. Developers on the free plan will get access to 2,000 code completions per month, for example, and as a GitHub spokesperson told me, each Copilot code suggestion will count against this limit -- not just accepted suggestions. And while GitHub recently added the ability to switch between different foundation models, users on the free plan are limited to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. (The paid plans also include Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini.) For Copilot Chat, the number of chat messages is limited to 50, but otherwise, there aren't any major limitations to the free service. Developers still get access to all Copilot Extensions and skills. As Dohmke told me, the team looked at the Copilot usage data from the last few years to figure out the threshold between occasional users and professional developers. "You log in and you have Copilot free available, and you can start coding with it, which is ultimately the one thing that people are trying to achieve, right? The outcome here is to build something with software and not to try an AI tool for the sake of AI." The free Copilot SKU will work in a number of editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains, as well as on GitHub.com. While Copilot has remained somewhat of a de facto standard for AI coding tools since it launched in 2021, the market today is also a bit more competitive, with startups like Tabnine and Qodo (previously known as Codium), as well as the likes of AWS, all offering competing services. These competitors typically offer a free plan as well, so it makes sense now for GitHub to lean into the wide distribution of VS Code and go freemium to expand Copilot's reach. "Our mission is to ... enable a billion users to become a developer worldwide -- and obviously, if you look around the world, whether it's in Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, in India or Indonesia, in Pakistan, their ten dollars are much more relative to the average income, and as such, we are hoping to also enable a lot more people who have the ambition to become a developer or use a Copilot to become a more productive, efficient, happy developer in those countries, all in the spirit of our one-billion-developer aspiration," Dohmke said. Dohmke said that he also expects more students to now use Copilot as well, because even though the company has long offered a free version to them, they always had to jump through a few hoops to certify that they were students. "With Copilot Free, we are returning to our freemium roots and are laying the groundwork for something far greater: AI represents our best path to enabling a GitHub with one billion developers. There should be no barrier to entry for experiencing the joy of creating software," Dohmke said. "Now six years after being acquired by Microsoft, it indeed appears GitHub is still GitHub -- and we are doing our thing."

GitHub Launches a Free Version of Copilot for All Developers

The free version of Copilot offers Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o models GitHub launched a free tier of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Copilot on Wednesday. The platform's Copilot is geared towards coding-related tasks and comes with several third-party agents, extensions and features such as multi-file editing. The free version of the chatbot comes with higher rate limits in code completions and chat messages compared to the paid version. GitHub Copilot Free will also not include the Gemini AI models. The Microsoft-owned coding and file-hosting platform also announced reaching the milestone of 150 million registered users. In a blog post, the coding platform announced the free tier of Copilot. So far, Copilot was only available with a paid subscription starting at $10 (roughly Rs. 850), although free access was given to verified students, teachers, and open-source maintainers. This new tier will be available to all the 150 million registered developers. The GitHub Copilot Free will be automatically integrated into the Visual Studio Code platform and offers access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. A thing to note here is that every code suggestion made by the chatbot counts towards the completion instead of just the accepted ones. Earlier this year, the company announced multi-model support in Copilot, allowing users to choose from Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI's GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini models. However, with the free tier of Copilot, users will only get access to 3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o. Apart from these restrictions, developers will get full access to all other features, third-party agents, and extensions. Additionally, GitHub has also made Copilot chat directly available from the platform's dashboard, which is also available with the free tier. With GitHub Copilot, developers can use the AI for code explanations, debugging, Bing-powered web searches, pull requests, multi-file editing in VS Code, integration with private codebase, custom instructions, and more. GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021 and was Microsoft's first AI-powered platform with the Copilot branding. It was introduced just months after the tech giant invested in OpenAI and formed a partnership.

Microsoft just made Github Copilot free -- here's why it's a big deal

Microsoft is making its GitHub Copilot AI developer assistant available for free. This means anyone can create apps with the help of AI. It is even available as a chatbot. GitHub Copilot was launched before ChatGPT by about a month. It came out in October 2021 to help developers automate some boring parts of writing code. Since then, it has expanded and can now do much of the work on its own. The free plan includes GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, but you only get 50 messages or interactions with the AI monthly. You'll need to pay $10 monthly for Pro to get unlimited access. This also brings with it access to o1 from OpenAI. This comes off the back of Microsoft announcing GitHub Spark earlier this year. It is an AI-agent-type service that can create mini-apps from a single prompt. Spark isn't yet widely available, but it could be an extension of a GitHub plan in the future. GitHub Copilot is like ChatGPT but built explicitly for code. You can use it in a number of different ways. One is to finish off lines of code as you write them, and the other is a simple chat interface that lets you ask questions about your code. You can use Copilot Chat inside the GitHub dashboard; all you need is a free GitHub account. You can also use it in a number of code editors, including Visual Studio Code, Apple Xcode and JetBrains. One example shared by GitHub showed how to use Copilot to create a clone of Conway's Game of Life using Copilot. I've personally used it to create word games, puzzles and even simple to-do list apps. If you've ever wanted to learn to build your apps or improve your coding abilities, GitHub Copilot's free launch is a good place to start.