Microsoft Makes GitHub Copilot Free in VS Code

Microsoft has announced a new free plan for GitHub Copilot for developers using VS Code.

With this announcement, GitHub Copilot becomes a core part of the VS Code experience — with more than 150 million developers using GitHub Copilot, Microsoft said.

“We are fusing the world’s most popular AI developer tool, GitHub Copilot, with the world’s most popular editor, VS Code,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in a LinkedIn video announcing the offering.

Nadella called the free offering “a real game changer” for developers.

“With Copilot Free, you can use chat to explain code in entirely natural language. You can build with multiple models, selecting the one that works best for you. You can render edits across your files with multi-file edits. You can access Copilot, a third-party ecosystem of agents, and of course, you can generate code completions — the core function that started the entire Copilot platform shift,” he said.

Offer Details

With GitHub Copilot Free you get 2000 code completions per month. “That’s about 80 per working day — which is a lot. You also get 50 chat requests/month, as well as access to both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models,” the Visual Studio Code team wrote in a blog post.

However, if you max out those limits, the paid Pro plan is unlimited and provides access to additional models like OpenAI o1 and Google Gemini (coming in the new year).

All you need is a GitHub account. No trial. No subscription. No credit card required, Microsoft said in the blog post. You can simply enable GitHub Copilot Free.

One Billion Developers

“Our ambition is to enable 1 billion developers on GitHub, and this is more possible than ever through the power of AI,” Nadella said. “I have to say, even for myself, the past several years, I have been using GitHub Copilot. My weekends have changed and have been much more fun. The joy of coding is back, and we are looking forward to bringing the same experience to so many more people around the world.”

Indeed, “2025 is going to be a huge year for GitHub Copilot, now a core part of the overall VS Code experience,” the VS Code team wrote.

Pressure Points

Brad Shimmin, an analyst at Omdia, called the offer “pretty nice” and said he thinks that it speaks to a couple of pressure points.

First, he said the initial approximately $20 per month subscription rate for Copilot seems a bit high. Particularly, “given that there are now a sizable number of free and open source models (most of which are small enough to run locally) that are just as good at generating code, chatting about code, and performing code completion tasks,” Shimmin told The New Stack.

“Second, VS Code itself is coming under some pressure from other AI-savvy IDEs like Zed, which are both free and comparatively free from hefty telemetry requirements,” he said.

So, opening a free tier makes perfect sense for Microsoft, which has been building more and more accessible AI into not just VS Code but also GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces.

“But in looking at the rate limits for this new tier, which caps off at 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, I do think that cost-conscious developers will still look elsewhere using local models such as Qwen, Gemma, Mistral, Phi, et al,” Shimmin said. “Even IDE-specific AI tools from rivals like Tabnine have a more cost-effective basic tier alongside a rate-limited free tier.”