Key takeaways
- GitHub Copilot is now free for users within Visual Studio Code, boosting accessibility.
- India and APAC experience a significant surge in Copilot activations post-free availability announcement.
- The free tier includes 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages monthly for all users.
- Users can choose between Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI's GPT-4o models for coding assistance.
- Students and educators maintain free access to Copilot Pro accounts, enhancing educational resources.
Earlier this week, GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform, 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.
Today, Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub posted on X that after the free availability of Copilot on VS Code, India and APAC region are witnessing a surge of activations.
We’re seeing a surge in Copilot Free activation in India and across APAC. It’s incredible to see.
— Thomas Dohmke (@ashtom) December 20, 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.
GitHub has been madly in love with the Indian developer ecosystem. During his visit in June, Dohmke said that he believes India will overtake the US as the largest developer community on the platform by 2027. To foster this ecosystem and assist developers across India and beyond, it has partnered with Indian IT firm Infosys and opened the first GitHub Center of Excellence at Infosys, Bengaluru.
