GitHub Copilot Free: Limits and How to Turn It On

In short

• GitHub Copilot Free is the official free Copilot plan. As of July 2026 it gives you 2,000 code completions and 50 chat requests per month; Copilot Edits and agent mode draw from the same pool.
• No credit card required: you switch the plan on in your GitHub account settings or straight from VS Code, and the limits reset every month. This is a permanent tier, not a trial.
• On the free plan the model is picked automatically; manual switching between GPT, Claude and Gemini is a paid-plan privilege.
• Copilot Pro costs $10/month: unlimited completions plus $15 of included AI credits. On June 1, 2026 GitHub moved paid plans to billing based on actual token consumption.
• Important for Russia: Copilot, Free included, is officially unavailable inside Russia because of GitHub's export controls — activation fails with "not available in your location". Paying doesn't solve it, and workarounds violate the terms of service.
• The free plan is enough to get a feel for an AI assistant and close a couple of small tasks a week. With daily work the limits burn out in a few days.

What GitHub Copilot Free is

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant from GitHub and Microsoft: it completes lines right in the editor, answers questions about your project in chat, and can work as an agent — editing several files and running commands on its own. Copilot Free is the free Copilot tier, launched in December 2024 as a permanent plan for individual developers.

Free works everywhere the paid plans do: VS Code, Visual Studio, JetBrains IDEs, Neovim, Xcode, and on github.com itself. A telling detail: in spring 2026, when GitHub temporarily closed signups for the paid tiers (more on that below), Free was the only plan new users could get.

If you're still sizing up AI tools, start with our overview of neural networks for writing code — there Copilot sits alongside a dozen competitors, which makes its place on the market clearer.

What the free plan includes and what the limits are

As of July 2026, Copilot Free looks like this:

• 2,000 code completions per month. A completion is the grey inline suggestion that appears as you type; each one is deducted from the monthly pool.
• 50 chat requests per month. This covers questions in Copilot Chat, edits through Copilot Edits, and prompts to agent mode. One prompt to the agent counts as one request from the pool — the agent's internal steps aren't billed separately.
• Automatic model selection. Free runs on auto model selection: GitHub decides which model to use. You can't switch to a specific model manually.
• No card, no auto-charges. Payment details are never requested, and limits reset at the start of each billing month.

Once the limit is spent, completions and chat stop working and the IDE shows a notice: wait for the reset or move to Pro. You can't buy extra capacity on Free.

How to turn Copilot Free on

1. Create an account on github.com or sign in to an existing one.
2. Open the Copilot settings at github.com/settings/copilot and activate the Free plan — no card is requested.
3. Connect your editor. In recent VS Code versions Copilot is already built in: click the Copilot icon in the status bar and sign in to your GitHub account. For JetBrains IDEs and Visual Studio, install the official GitHub Copilot plugin.
4. Check that it works: start typing a function and grey suggestions will appear; chat opens in its own panel.

One caveat: these steps only work if your region isn't under GitHub restrictions — see the section on Russia below.

And a piece of advice from practice: don't stop at "accept the suggestion". A deliberate process — context, decomposition, verifying the result — buys you more than any limit; we broke down how to build one in vibe coding: where to start.

How Free differs from Pro

Copilot Pro is the entry-level paid plan at $10/month. The difference isn't only the size of the limits, but the billing principle: on June 1, 2026 GitHub moved every paid plan to usage-based billing. The old "premium requests" are gone; in their place are AI Credits — a monetary pool included in the subscription, from which the actual token consumption of your chosen model is deducted. Completions on paid plans don't spend credits and aren't capped.

Comparison as of July 2026:

Above Pro there's Pro+ ($39/month, $70 in credits) and Max, introduced in 2026 ($100/month, $200 in credits) — for heavy agent workloads. Students get Copilot Student: a free plan with unlimited completions and a credit pool after verification through GitHub Education.

Useful context: on April 20, 2026 GitHub paused signups for Pro, Pro+ and Student — agent sessions started consuming more compute than the subscriptions were worth. Signups gradually reopened on June 16 under the new billing terms. The practical takeaway for a Free user: agent mode is the fastest way to burn through your 50 requests, so spend them on targeted questions rather than on "do it all yourself".

Does Copilot work from Russia

The honest answer: no. GitHub itself opens from Russia and public repositories are available, but Copilot — the free plan included — is unavailable to users inside Russia and Belarus: GitHub cites export restrictions (Trade Controls). Trying to activate it gives you the error "Copilot is not available in your location". This is a block at the region and account level, not a payment issue — a working foreign card changes nothing.

We don't recommend getting around the restriction by spoofing your region: it's a direct violation of GitHub's terms of use, and the service enforces sanctions restrictions at the account level — putting a profile with your repositories and history at risk isn't sensible.

Legally, Copilot is available to people who genuinely live or work outside the restricted regions, with a local address and a card from a local bank. For those in Russia, a more realistic route is different:

• pick an assistant with no regional block, or one you can run locally — see the alternatives section;
• look at the Claude ecosystem: the legal access routes are collected in Claude API from Russia, and what Claude Code offers on free limits is covered in Claude Code for free.

Who the free plan is enough for

Let's measure the limits against real scenarios:

• Enough: you're learning to program, you write code a couple of evenings a week, and you want to understand what an AI assistant is worth before paying. At that pace, 2,000 suggestions stretch across the month.
• Just barely: a pet project on weekends plus active chat use. 50 requests is two or three dense sessions with architecture discussion and edits through Edits.
• Not enough: daily coding (completions run out in a week to a week and a half), regular agent mode, or work on a large project where you need chat constantly.

If Free ran out and you're not ready to pay $10 for Pro yet, look at the competitors: some have more generous free plans, and on agent tasks Cursor looks stronger — full breakdown in our comparison of GitHub Copilot vs Cursor.

Free alternatives to Copilot Free

What the market offers as of July 2026:

• Gemini Code Assist (Google) — the most generous cloud free plan: roughly 6,000 completion requests per day. Formally restricted in Russia as well.
• Amazon Q Developer (AWS) — unlimited completions plus a few dozen agent tasks per month on the free plan; AWS services also officially don't onboard new customers in Russia.
• Windsurf Free — 25 prompt credits per month and unlimited fast autocomplete.
• Continue.dev and Cline — open-source extensions for VS Code and JetBrains: free in themselves, you plug in your own API key or a local model through Ollama. A local model is the only option with no limits and no regional restrictions at all — it even works offline.

The full market picture, paid tools included, is in our overview of the best vibe coding tools of 2026.

And the main conclusion from our own practice with all of these assistants: the bottleneck isn't free limits, it's the absence of a system. Without project rules, prepared context and task decomposition, any tool — Free or $100 a month — generates chaos, just at different speeds. We packaged that system into the Quest engine: a discipline layer on top of the tool, which exports to Claude Code, to Cursor, and to a universal AGENTS.md. You can swap assistants every month if you like — the rules and accumulated work move with you; we showed how that works in the article on engine portability across Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code.

FAQ

Is Copilot Free permanent or a trial period?

It's a permanent tier, not a trial. The limits — 2,000 completions and 50 chat requests as of July 2026 — reset every month, no card is attached, and there are no auto-charges.

What happens when the limit runs out?

Completions and chat stop responding until the end of the billing month, and the IDE shows a notice offering an upgrade. Your code, settings and history aren't lost; you can't buy extra capacity without moving to a paid plan.

Is there a free Copilot for students?

Yes, the Copilot Student plan: unlimited completions and a pool of AI credits after your student status is verified through GitHub Education (a student email address or proof of enrollment). As of July 2026 signups are gradually resuming after the spring pause; until your application is approved, regular Free is available.

Can I pay for Copilot Pro from Russia?

Payment isn't the issue: Copilot is unavailable in Russia at the level of GitHub's regional restrictions, and a foreign card doesn't get around that. Legal access belongs to people who live or work abroad. From Russia it's more practical to pick a tool with no block — options are in our overview of neural networks for writing code.

How is Copilot Free different from free ChatGPT for code?

Copilot is built into the editor: it sees your open files, completes code on the fly, and edits the project through Edits. Browser chatbots don't see project context — you have to copy code back and forth, and on anything bigger than a single file that quickly hits a ceiling.