GitHub made Copilot free with monthly limits

A metered free tier, not a discount

On 18 December 2024, GitHub announced GitHub Copilot Free, available to any personal GitHub account without a card, automatically active in VS Code and reachable as chat from the GitHub dashboard. The free tier's monthly allowance was set at 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages, with a choice between Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI's GPT-4o. Students, educators and open-source maintainers with existing unlimited Pro access kept it unchanged. The cap, not a price, is what defines this tier: once the monthly allowance is used, the free service is throttled rather than billed.

Who it suits, and how the meter works

The free tier suits individual and hobbyist developers evaluating Copilot, or anyone whose editing volume genuinely fits inside a low monthly ceiling. Completions and chat messages draw down the same monthly allowance, which resets on a cycle rather than accumulating, so a quiet month does not bank credit for a busy one.

The friction: usage caps are the real price list now

GitHub's current documentation, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, shows the lineup has grown well past Free and Pro: Student, Pro at $10 a month, Pro+ at $39, Max at $100, and seat-based Business and Enterprise plans at $19 and $39. Code completions are unlimited on every paid plan, but each paid tier now also carries a separate monthly allowance of AI credits that meters premium models and agent features, from 1,500 credits on Pro up to 20,000 on Max, confirmed on GitHub's own features page. That means comparing plans by seat price alone understates the real difference: two plans at different prices can differ mainly in how many premium-model or agent tasks the credit allowance actually covers, which is closer to the old free tier's completion cap than to a flat unlimited service.

• Will 2,000 completions and 50 chat messages a month cover your actual editing volume?
• If a task needs a third-party agent or a premium model, does your current tier support it at all?
• Are you comparing plans by seat price, or by the credit allowance each seat actually includes?

Making Copilot free did not remove metering; it moved the meter to the front of the product. The same is now true, in a different form, of every paid tier above it.