GitHub announces 150 million developers and a new free tier for GitHub Copilot in VS Code

GitHub, the most widely adopted Copilot-powered developer platform, today announced the launch of GitHub Copilot Free in VS Code, and that it has surpassed 150M developers on the platform.

“With GitHub Copilot Free in VS Code, India can accelerate the timeline forward to becoming the largest developer community in the world. But only if we make it happen,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. “Let us now empower every person in India to build and create code in natural language—and to code with Copilot.”

Now automatically integrated into VS Code, all GitHub users have access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, simply by signing in with a personal GitHub account, or by creating a new one.

Copilot Free gives developers the choice between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. They can ask a coding question, explain existing code, or have it find a bug. Users can also execute edits across multiple files, and access Copilot’s third-party agents or build their own extension.

Additionally, Copilot Chat is now directly available from the GitHub dashboard and works with Copilot Free, so all developers can start using it today.

Copilot Free continues GitHub’s long history of offering free products and services so anyone can build software. Starting with free open source and public collaboration, GitHub added free private repos, free minutes for GitHub Actions and GitHub Codespaces, and free package and release storage.

Students, educators, and open source maintainers will continue to enjoy unlimited access to their Copilot Pro accounts for free.

About GitHub

GitHub is the world’s most widely adopted Copilot-powered developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software. Over 150 million developers, including more than 90% of the Fortune 100 companies, use GitHub to collaborate and more than 77,000 organizations have adopted GitHub Copilot.