GitHub launched a free tier of the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Copilot on Wednesday. The platform’s Copilot is geared towards coding-related tasks and comes with several third-party agents, extensions and features such as multi-file editing. The free version of the chatbot comes with higher rate limits in code completions and chat messages compared to the paid version. GitHub Copilot Free will also not include the Gemini AI models. The Microsoft-owned coding and file-hosting platform also announced reaching the milestone of 150 million registered users.
In a blog post, the coding platform announced the free tier of Copilot. So far, Copilot was only available with a paid subscription starting at $10 (roughly Rs. 850), although free access was given to verified students, teachers, and open-source maintainers. This new tier will be available to all the 150 million registered developers.
The GitHub Copilot Free will be automatically integrated into the Visual Studio Code platform and offers access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. A thing to note here is that every code suggestion made by the chatbot counts towards the completion instead of just the accepted ones.
Earlier this year, the company announced multi-model support in Copilot, allowing users to choose from Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, o1-preview, and o1-mini models. 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 directly available from the platform’s dashboard, which is also available with the free tier.
With GitHub Copilot, developers can use the AI for code explanations, debugging, Bing-powered web searches, pull requests, multi-file editing in VS Code, integration with private codebase, custom instructions, and more.
GitHub Copilot was launched in 2021 and was Microsoft’s first AI-powered platform with the Copilot branding. It was introduced just months after the tech giant invested in OpenAI and formed a partnership.
