How to get Github Copilot for 100% free

Vasanth Bhat
Geek Culture
Published in
3 min readJul 3, 2022

I believe most of you know what Github Co-pilot is, in case you don’t, below is the explanation.

GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that helps you write code faster and with less work. It draws context from comments and code to suggest individual lines and whole functions instantly. GitHub Copilot is powered by Codex, a generative pretrained language model created by OpenAI. It is available as an extension for Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Neovim, and the JetBrains suite of integrated development environments (IDEs).

You can watch the Below video of mine to know how to get Github Co-Pilot for free or you can read the article till the end.

Earlier Github Co-Pilot was free for all the pre-registered users, this was so because, Github wanted to make the co-pilot’s AI modal as user friendly as possible by training it across different languages and code bases. Now Github Co-Pilot has reached around 26% accuracy. Now Github is thinking is a good accuracy to start charging for Github Co-Pilot.

What’s the subscription cost of Github Co-Pilot at the moment:

https://github.com/github-copilot/signup

Though this software is a brilliant piece of human creation, everybody will not be able to afford this (Most people are used to getting free softwares). So, I have found a legal way to get Github Co-pilot for free of cost.

Below are the steps to get Github Co-pilot for free of cost.

As it is mentioned in Github's official documentation. Co-pilot will be free for all the open source contributors and for the students.

  1. If you’re heavily contributing to open source, by creating libraries or fixing bugs in the existing popular libraries. Then Github already knows you and when you try to opt for the Github Co-pilot subscription, it will be free of cost for you.
  2. Or if you’re a student who is enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study such as a high school, secondary school, college, university, homeschool, or similar educational institutions then you can avail Github Co-pilot for free of cost. Github will take your education details and validate it. If you provide the right details then you will be getting access to Github Co-Pilot for free.
  3. If you're already working and pursuing a part-time education / diploma somewhere you might be eligible to apply for a licence under the student category. But I’m not sure about Github's scrutiny process, but it is worth giving a try.

If any of the steps do not work for you then there are multiple open source alternatives to Github Co-pilot, if you want to know about them let me know in the comment section, I will write an article explaining all of them.

In case if you want to talk to me personally for mock interview, tips and tricks to clear interview or resume review, you can book a session here:

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Vasanth Bhat
Geek Culture

Mobile Application Developer at Walmart. 6+ years of Software experience, Scalability Specialist, Coffee lover, likes travelling and writing.