GitHub Hits 150 Mn Developers, Offers Free Copilot in VS Code

GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform, has announced that it is making its AI-powered coding tool, GitHub Copilot, available for free within Visual Studio Code (VS Code). This announcement comes against the backdrop of GitHub reaching 150 million developers on its platform.

GitHub Copilot Free for VS Code has arrived. pic.twitter.com/DVChR5Shub

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) December 18, 2024

The free tier of GitHub Copilot provides users with up to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, available to anyone who signs in with an existing GitHub account or creates a new one.

“Copilot Free gives you the choice between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. You can ask a coding question, explain existing code, or have it find a bug,” GitHub said in its blog post. The service allows users to make edits across multiple files and access third-party agents or build their own extensions.

GitHub also announced that Copilot Chat is now available directly from the GitHub dashboard, working with Copilot Free. This is aimed at GitHub’s 150 million developers, who will now have free access to these tools.

Students, educators, and open-source maintainers will continue to have free access to Copilot Pro accounts, the company added.

The rollout of GitHub Copilot Free marks a significant expansion of the platform’s free services, which have historically included free private repositories, GitHub Actions, Codespaces, and package and release storage.

GitHub’s move comes amid growing competition from tools like Cursor, and Windsurf.Cursor recently released version 0.43, introducing several new features, including a new Composer UI in the sidebar with inline diffs and an early version of an agent in Composer that can select its own context and use the terminal. Meanwhile, Codeium, the creator of Windsurf, announced that the platform is powered by Anthropic’s Claude models.