Microsoft introduces free GitHub Copilot tier for VS Code users

Offers 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month

Microsoft has introduced a free tier for users of its GitHub Copilot AI service who also use its VS Code code editor/IDE.

The free tier offers developers with a GitHub account 2,000 code completions per month, plus 50 chat requests and access to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet models.

"With this announcement, GitHub Copilot becomes a core part of the VS Code experience," said developer advocate Burke Holland in a blog post.

As well as code completion, GitHub Copilot can perform tasks such as assisting non-English speaking coders with translations, making changes over multiple files, refactoring code, answering questions, configuring and generating tests and others, acting as a virtual pair programmer.

Those requiring additional code completions, advanced features and access to models including GPT-o1 and Google Gemini will need to pay for a Team or Enterprise subscription, which come in at US $4 and $21 per user per month, respectively.

While describing the free features as generous, Microsoft will obviously be hoping many developers choose to upgrade, or at least be less tempted to stray from its ecosystem.

There are coders who swear by AI assistants like GitHub Copilot, saying they increase their productivity and code quality, and a recent GitHub study found that Copilot helps developers write code up to 55% faster, with improved readability and quality.

However, not all agree. Prominent developer and blogger (and sell-professed AI sceptic) Dan Cîmpianu found GitHub's study to be misleading and underwhelming.

“f you really want to test Copilot, give it complex tasks, diverse tasks that involve huge SQL queries, regular expressions, shell-script deployments, anything more impressive than defining some REST stubs and type hints in Python,” he wrote.

At least there's now a way for developers to see for themselves at no extra cost.