Announcing 150M developers and a new free tier for GitHub Copilot in VS Code

GitHub has a long history of offering free products and services to developers. Starting with free open source and public collaboration, we added free private repos, free minutes for GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces, and free package and release storage. Today, we are adding GitHub Copilot to the mix by launching GitHub Copilot Free.

Now automatically integrated into VS Code, all of you have access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, simply by signing in with your personal GitHub account. Or by creating a new one. And just last week, we passed the mark of 150M developers on GitHub. 🎉

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. You can execute edits across multiple files. And you can access Copilot’s third-party agents or build your own extension.

Did you know that Copilot Chat is now directly available from the GitHub dashboard and it works with Copilot Free, so you can start using it today? We couldn’t be more excited to make Copilot available to the 150M developers on GitHub.

Happy coding!

P.S. Students, educators, and open source maintainers: your free access to unlimited Copilot Pro accounts continues, unaffected! 😉

Written by

Thomas Dohmke

@ashtom

Fascinated by software development since his childhood in Germany, Thomas Dohmke has built a career building tools to accelerate developer happiness. Previously, Thomas was the Chief Executive Officer of GitHub (2021-2025) where he oversaw the rise of the world’s most widely adopted AI developer tools—including the launches of GitHub Copilot, Copilot Workspace, and GitHub Models. Thomas has also been a celebrated TED speaker and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from University of Glasgow, UK.