Analyst(s): Mitch Ashley
Publication Date: January 3, 2025
GitHub announced reaching 150 million developers and introduced a free tier of its popular GitHub Copilot AI development tool, aiming to expand its user base and funnel developers toward its paid Copilot Pro and other offerings. Copilot integrates seamlessly with the most widely used IDEs, enhancing productivity through AI-assisted coding, debugging, and workflow automation. This move underscores the rapidly growing and highly competitive AI market in software development between tech giants such as Microsoft, Google, AWS, Atlassian, and GitHub. The free tier aligns with free tiers and trials, making AI-powered coding tools more accessible and driven by advancements in generative AI uses in software development.
What is Covered in this Article:
- GitHub introduced Copilot Free AI-aided development tool to their 150 million developer user base.
- Copilot Free easily integrates into Microsoft’s widely used IDEs VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains, and others, enabling developers to ask a coding question, explain code, find a bug, make edits across multiple files, build extensions, and access third-party Copilot agents.
- Copilot Free supports Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI GPT-4o models.
The News: GitHub combines the announcement that it has reached 150 million developers along with announcing a free tier of the popular GitHub Copilot AI development tool. Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock in October 2018.
GitHub Copilot Free Tier Aims to Propel GitHub Beyond 150 Million Developers
Analyst Take: Copilots and similar coding assistant technologies are among the hottest areas where AI is rapidly making its way into software development. Because of the inherent extensibility of integrated developer environments (IDEs), AI innovations are easily added to developers’ workflows, seamlessly integrating into a user experience model with which developers work every day.
IDEs are the primary work environment for software engineers, akin to Office 365 and Google Workspace as primary work environments for general computer users. For anyone who isn’t a developer, imagine an IDE is your integrated development work surface for most of your daily software workflow, including checking in and out code from the repository, creating and editing code, testing and debugging, running tests, automation, access to reference information, programming languages, packages, and libraries, and working across multiple projects and software stacks (to name a few).
GitHub Copilot works directly within the GitHub dashboard and integrates with the most widely used IDEs: Visual Studio, VS Code, JetBrains (including IntelliJ IDEA, Android Studio, PyCharm, and WebStorm), Azure Data Studio, Apple Xcode, Vim/Neovim.
While the announcement of a free tier of GitHub Copilot isn’t earth-shattering, it does signify GitHub’s effort to continue to grow its user base of developers utilizing Copilot and serve as another entry point to building its subscriber base of GitHub Copilot Pro ($10/month) users. Copilot Pro is already free to students and nonprofit organizations.
Developers don’t easily abandon one IDE for another. Whichever vendor, whether it be Microsoft, GitHub, Google, AWS, Atlassian, or others, delivers the best and most productive development work surface and is a gateway to additional offerings and future AI innovations. In addition to removing Copilot Free’s limitations on code completions and chats, Copilot Pro provides unfettered access to GitHub’s growing suite of offerings, including GitHub Actions (CI/CD), GitHub Codespaces (online development environments), GithHub Code Review, GitHub Mobile, GitHub Advance Security, GitHub Copilot Autofix, and third-party add-ons via GitHub Pilot Extensions.
It’s reasonable to question what took GitHub so long to come out with a free tier of Copilot, opening up GitHub’s platform of development environment workflow, security, and automation offerings to an even broader audience. The use of larger foundational models in AI development tools will soon be free anyway, with the expected introduction of generative AI LLMs and SLMs specialized in development tasks, software quality, security, upgrades, and maintenance.
What to Watch:
- Expect a ping-pong effect between vendor announcements of new AI capabilities across the software development lifecycle as AI and AI agents move deeper into development tasks and workflows.
- Today’s AI in-development products are tomorrow’s features as vendors race to bring out new AI products and maintain parody with other vendors’ new offerings.
- Early, narrowly focused AI offerings will likely become commoditized as AI is put to work on higher-value, more complex software lifecycle problems.
- Emphasize AI and AI agent development technologies that can work across software stacks, hyperscaler cloud environments, and parallel development streams of work.
- Codium, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and Tabnine offer free tiers or time-limited trials. Google Gemini Code Assist does not.
See the GitHub blog post for more information about GitHub Copilot Free.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Mitch Ashley is VP and Practice Lead of Software Lifecycle Engineering for The Futurum Group. Mitch has over 30+ years of experience as an entrepreneur, industry analyst, product development, and IT leader, with expertise in software engineering, cybersecurity, DevOps, DevSecOps, cloud, and AI. As an entrepreneur, CTO, CIO, and head of engineering, Mitch led the creation of award-winning cybersecurity products utilized in the private and public sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and all military branches. Mitch also led managed PKI services for broadband, Wi-Fi, IoT, energy management and 5G industries, product certification test labs, an online SaaS (93m transactions annually), and the development of video-on-demand and Internet cable services, and a national broadband network.
Mitch shares his experiences as an analyst, keynote and conference speaker, panelist, host, moderator, and expert interviewer discussing CIO/CTO leadership, product and software development, DevOps, DevSecOps, containerization, container orchestration, AI/ML/GenAI, platform engineering, SRE, and cybersecurity. He publishes his research on futurumgroup.com and TechstrongResearch.com/resources. He hosts multiple award-winning video and podcast series, including DevOps Unbound, CISO Talk, and Techstrong Gang.
