GitHub on Wednesday launched a free tier of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Copilot. The platform’s CoPilot is geared towards coding-related tasks and comes with several third-party agents, extensions, and features like multi-file editing. The free version of the chatbot comes with a higher rate limit on code completion and chat messages than the paid version. GitHub Copilot Free will also not include Gemini AI models. The Microsoft-owned coding and file-hosting platform also announced reaching the milestone of 150 million registered users.
GitHub launches a free tier of Copilot for developers
In a blog post, the coding platform announced the free tier of Copilot. Until now, Copilot was only available with a paid subscription starting at $10 (roughly Rs. 850), though verified students, teachers, and open-source maintainers were given free access. This new tier will be available to all 150 million registered developers.
GitHub Copilot Free will automatically integrate into the Visual Studio Code platform and provide access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. The thing to note here is that every code suggestion given by the chatbot is counted towards completion rather than just accepted.
Earlier this year, the company announced multi-model support in Copilot, allowing users to choose between Anthropic’s Cloud 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, O1-Preview, and O1-Mini models. Got permission. 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 available directly from the platform’s dashboard, which is also available with the free tier.
With GitHub Copilot, developers can use AI for code clarification, debugging, Bing-powered web search, pull requests, multi-file editing in VS Code, integration with private codebases, custom instructions, and more.
GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021 and was Microsoft’s first AI-powered platform with Copilot branding. It was introduced just a few months after the tech giant invested in OpenAI and formed a partnership.
