GitHub introduces free Copilot tier for developers worldwide

GitHub, the Microsoft-owned developer platform, announced surpassing 150 million developers globally. The company also unveiled ‘GitHub Copilot Free’ in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), allowing seamless integration with GitHub accounts and offering Copilot Chat directly on the GitHub dashboard.

“With GitHub Copilot Free in VS Code, India has the potential to become the largest developer community in the world—but only if we make it happen,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.

GitHub Copilot Free provides all users with 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages monthly by signing in with a GitHub account. Developers can choose between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o models, enabling them to ask coding questions, debug code, execute edits across files, and utilize Copilot’s third-party agents or build extensions.

India’s developer community has grown significantly, with over 17 million developers on GitHub, marking a 28% rise in 2024. It is now the fastest-growing developer community globally and the second-largest contributor to public generative AI projects on GitHub, following the US. Contributions from India to these projects increased by 95% year-over-year, placing the country third worldwide, after the US and Hong Kong.

Dohmke highlighted that India’s developers are leveraging AI to build AI at unprecedented rates, positioning the country to produce the next major multinational. GitHub predicts India will surpass the US as the world’s largest developer community by 2028.

GitHub Copilot Free, now integrated into VS Code, aims to empower this growth by providing advanced AI tools accessible to developers worldwide.