Gemini Code Assist is Now Free for Individuals

Google announced today that it is making its Gemini Code Assist AI coding assistant free for individuals worldwide.

“While well-resourced organizations are empowering their engineering teams with the latest AI capabilities, that level of tooling hasn’t always been accessible to students, hobbyists, freelancers and startups,” Google senior director Ryan J. Salva writes. “And with a worldwide population of developers forecasted to grow to 57.8 million by 2028, we think AI should be available to them whether they can pay for it or not, so they can start building with what are quickly becoming the standard digital tools of the future.”

On that note, Google has made a new version of its AI coding assistant, called Gemini Code Assist for Individuals, available for free, worldwide, in public preview form. Gemini Code Assist for Individuals is powered by the recently released Gemini 2.0, is optimized for coding, and supports all programming languages in the public domain.

But the big deal here is its usage limits. Where the free version of GitHub Copilot provides 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages each month, Gemini Code Assist for Individuals is, in Google’s words, “more generous.” It provides 180,000 code completions and 128,000 input token support in chat each month–which Google correctly notes is “practically unlimited capacity.” That context window lets developers use large files and ground Gemini Code Assist with a broader understanding of their local codebases, Google notes.

(And speaking of GitHub, Google has also released a public preview of Gemini Code Assist for GitHub that provides free, AI-powered code reviews for both public and private repositories. You can learn more about this app in the GitHub Marketplace.)

Gemini Code Assist for Individuals is available in the Visual Studio Code and JetBrains integrated developer environments (IDEs), and Android Studio and Firebase already offer similar functionality for free to businesses as well.

You can learn more about Gemini Code Assist for Individuals (Preview) on the Code Assist website. But this is a major leap forward for professional and would-be developers alike. All the major AI models have software coding capabilities, and while some, like Anthropic Claude, are particularly well suited for this task, it’s astonishing to see this kind of thing just be given away for free.