Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.
GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023.
“My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open source maintainers.”
My question is, why give it for free? Has their product developed enough to win in the AI developer space? Are we reaching the point where you could self-host an AI code assistant as good as copilot? Or are projects such as johnny.ai (renamed, I’m not going to advertise it) challenging Microsoft’s market share in the AI developer space?
My only guess is Microsoft wants you to get used to their ecosystem and further ingrain developers into their development ecosystem. At best, once you are used to their ecosystem you’ll stick with them out of familiarity. At worst, they can use your input (prompts, refactors, etc) to further the development of copilot.
To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?
Edit: johnny.ai seems to be a domain offered for resale by godaddy. I didn’t mean to link them but I’ll leave it here, don’t give godaddy money as they are a terrible domain name registrar.
That’s exactly it.
From their email:
So it’s just a rate limited thing meant to get you signed up and then cut you off right when you get used to it. I get access through work and well, it just sucks.
And you can’t opt out…
If you have a GitHub account you are auto added in.
What do you mean? You have to create an account and log in. Am I missing something?
If you have a github account, you have this. You can decide to not use it… unless it gets intertwined more and more in your tools and you have to actively make sure your IDE is not suddenly sending your whole private project to MS servers because it was enabled by default.
So you can opt out
Please point me to anything, anywhere in your github profile, settings, or whatever, that allows you to make sure that this feature will not be enabled for you.
I’ll wait.
You’re the one making the false claim it cannot me opted out right now. If you want you prove that claim go ahead.
As you want you also prove the future, please prove it won’t be possible to opt out in the future.
I know you will come empty handed, so won’t bother waiting
I have a hard time parsing your sentences, but it seems you don’t understand. You can’t opt out of those “free” credits. It’s a simple matter of not having the option given to us.
It’s a free sample, which is a very common marketing technique. The free tier only gives you 2000 code completions a month so if you end up using it a lot you’ll need to switch to a paid tier. Nothing particularly nefarious there.
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