GitHub Copilot launched a free tier - 2,000 completions and 50 chat messages a month, no card required

Announced at GitHub Universe alongside Copilot Workspace updates, rolled out broadly in VS Code on 18 December: a permanent free tier offering 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, with access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and o1-preview. Reframed the 'pay $10/mo or pirate' equation for solo developers and students. The math behind it: GitHub had been losing the AI-coding narrative to Cursor, Cody, and Continue, and a free tier is the only credible response when your competitor is bundled into a $20 IDE. For solo founders, this means there's now no excuse to be coding without inline AI - even before you commit to Cursor or paid Copilot.