Microsoft-owned GitHub on Wednesday announced a free version of its popular code completion/AI pair programming tool Copilot. The tool now also ships with Microsoft's popular VS Code editor by default. Previously, most developers had to pay a monthly fee starting at $10 per month, and free access was only available to verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers.
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] We had free private repositories in 2018, and we launched that very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday's announcement. “Then we had something like v2 in 2020, which was a free private organization. [GitHub] Right of action. I think about it in space for the first time. [conference] As CEO, we announced free Codespaces. So, at some point, it felt natural to reach a stage where we would offer Copilot completely free, not just for students and open source maintainers. ”
The free version has some limitations and is intended for occasional users rather than major work in large projects.
For example, developers on the free plan now have access to 2,000 code completions per month, and a GitHub spokesperson told me that each code suggestion in Copilot, not just the accepted suggestions, will count towards this limit. GitHub also recently added the ability to switch between different underlying models, but free plan users are limited to Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. (Paid plans also include Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, OpenAI's o1-preview and -mini.)
Github CEO Thomas Dohmke speaks at the Digital Life Design (DLD) Innovation Conference. Image credit: Matthias Balk/picture Alliance via Getty Images / Getty Images
For Copilot Chat, the number of chat messages is limited to 50, but otherwise the free service does not have any major limitations. Developers continue to have access to all Copilot extensions and skills.
Dohmke told me that the team looked at Copilot usage data over the past few years to figure out the line between occasional users and professional developers.
“Once you log in, Copilot is available for free and you can start coding with it. That's one thing that people are ultimately trying to accomplish, right? It’s about building something with it, not trying AI tools for AI’s sake.”
The free Copilot SKU works with GitHub.com as well as many editors including VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains.
Copilot has remained something of a de facto standard for AI coding tools since its launch in 2021, but today's market is dominated by startups like Tabnine and Qodo (formerly known as Codium). Competition from companies such as Amazon and AWS has also become a little more intense. , all of which offer competing services. These competitors typically also offer free plans, so it makes sense for GitHub to focus on a broader distribution of VS Code and move to freemium to expand Copilot's reach.
“Our mission…is to enable 1 billion users around the world to become developers. And obviously, if you look around the world in Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, India, Indonesia, Pakistan… of 10 The dollar is much more expensive,” so we have more ambitions to become developers or to use CoPilot to become more productive, efficient and happy developers in these countries. We want to be able to support as many people as possible in all spirits. It's the aspiration of our billion developers,” Domke said.
Domke also said more students will be using Copilot in the future. The company has long offered a free version to students, but they've always had to jump through several hoops to prove they're still a student.
“With Copilot Free, we are returning to the roots of freemium and laying the foundation for something even greater. AI is the best path to GitHub with 1 billion developers. Create software. There should be no barrier to entry to experience the joy of doing things,” says Dohmke. “Six years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub is still GitHub, and we're still doing what we do.”