GitHub Copilot is Now Free in Visual Studio Code

GitHub today announced GitHub Copilot Free, a free new tier of GitHub Copilot that integrates directly with Visual Studio Code.

“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,” GitHub’s Thomas Dohmke writes in the announcement post. “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.”

Looking at the GitHub Copilot site, it appears that the main limitation of GitHub Copilot Free when compared to the free versions is usage-based: Where GitHub Copilot Pro, Business, and Enterprise all offer unlimited messages, interactions, and real-time code suggestions each month, the free version tops out at 50 messages and interactions, and 2000 code suggestions per month. It also doesn’t offer pull request, issue, and discussion summaries, and some other high-end features.

But the basics are all there: You can use different models, tailor the chat to your codebase, integrate with unlimited GitHub Copilot extensions, build your own private extensions, access core features like chat and prompt suggestions, and get code feedback in Visual Studio Code.

If you use Visual Studio Code, you can enable this integration now: With this, GitHub Copilot becomes a core part of the Visual Studio Code experience. You can learn more on the Visual Studio Code blog.