GitHub, the popular software development platform owned by Microsoft, has announced that it has made its artificial intelligence-powered code completion tool called Copilot free of charge with a revolutionary decision. Copilot, which was previously only free for students, teachers and those running open source projects, can now be used free of charge by all developers with certain limitations.
Copilot will now be offered by default with Microsoft’s popular code editing tool Visual Studio Code. Thomas Dohmke, the company’s CEO, emphasised that this step is a natural reflection of GitHub’s long-standing policy of providing access to free tools.
Limitations and features
The free plan appeals more to developers who write code occasionally. Under this plan, users will be entitled to 2,000 code completions per month. In addition, every proposed code completion will be included in this limit, not just those approved. There is also a 50 message limit for the chat feature.
Free users will be able to use Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o . However, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro model and other advanced AI options are only available with paid subscriptions. Other than that, all of Copilot’s extensions and features are available for free. A GitHub spokesperson stated that these limitations are not suitable for professional developers, but rather for software development beginners or small-scale projects. The free Copilot SKU will work in a number of editors, including VS Code, Visual Studio and JetBrains, as well as GitHub.com.
Since its launch in 2021, Copilot has been the leader in AI-powered coding tools, but there are serious competitors in the market, including Tabnine, Qodo and AWS. Since these companies also offer free plans, GitHub’s move aims to both increase its competitiveness and expand the use of Copilot.
GitHub announced that there are currently 150 million developers on its platform. This shows that the company has reached this level from 100 million developers in just one year. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke pointed out that the free Copilot decision is part of its goal to make the software development field more accessible on a global scale.
