GitHub just launched a new free tier for its Copilot coding assistant – but only for a select group of developers

GitHub has launched a new free tier of its Copilot AI coding assistant for developers using the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) developer environment.

There are limitations, however, and the free offer is intended for occasional users rather than full-time developers, which currently pay $10 a month for access to the AI-powered tool.

The offer includes 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages each month, with access to Copilot edits and Copilot Extensions.

Users can choose from OpenAI’s GPT-4o or Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, rather than the full set offered to the paid-for subscriptions, which also includes Google Gemini 1.5 Pro and OpenAI o1-preview and o1-min.

The free tools are accessible by signing into a personal GitHub account. The company noted that it now has 150m developers using the platform.

“You can ask a coding question, explain existing code, or have it find a bug. You can execute edits across multiple files,” said CEO Thomas Dohmke in a blog post.

“And you can access Copilot’s third-party agents or build your own extension.”

Back to freemium

GitHub already offers Copilot Pro free of charge to students, schools, and the open source community, and that access won’t change.

Indeed, Dohmke told TechCrunch in an interview that GitHub wanted to expand its free access.

“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,” he told the publication.

“There should be no barrier to entry for experiencing the joy of creating software.”

Better for coders?

Free access will give a wider range of coders access to the tools, beyond those developing professionally in their day-to-day work. But it remains to be seen how useful such AI-powered tools are when it comes to producing code.

Back in September, GitHub released figures that found Copilot helped developers code 55% faster, while also slightly improving readability, reliability, maintainability, and conciseness.

However, research from Uplevel contradicted those findings, suggesting the rate of work completed was about the same, but bugs increased by an alarming 41%.

That said, at the time of its research, GitHub noted how difficult it can be to measure developer productivity, and what coders see as a “good day” has more to do with personal satisfaction and project progress than mere production of code — and, of course, the quality of code produced matters.

That suggests such AI coding tools might prove useful for some coders and less for others, perhaps depending on the nature of the project.

“Between 60–75% of users reported they feel more fulfilled with their job, feel less frustrated when coding, and are able to focus on more satisfying work when using GitHub Copilot,” the company said at the time — and now at least no coder needs to pay to find out if that’s true for them.