Google Gemini’s AI coding tool is now free for individual users

A free version of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused AI coding tool, is now available globally for solo developers. Google announced today that Gemini Code Assist for individuals is launching in public preview, aiming to make coding assistants “with the latest AI capabilities” more accessible for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups.

“Now anyone can more conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify their existing applications — all without needing to toggle between different windows for help or to copy and paste information from disconnected sources,” said Ryan J. Salva, Google’s senior director of product management. “While other popular free coding assistants have restrictive usage limits, with usually only 2,000 code completions per month, we wanted to offer something more generous.”

That feels particularly targeted at GitHub Copilot, the most direct competitor to Gemini Code Assist, which also provides a free user tier that’s limited to 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot Chat messages each month. Google is offering up to 180,000 code completions per month by contrast, which it describes as “a ceiling so high that even today’s most dedicated professional developers would be hard-pressed to exceed it.”

Like the enterprise version, Gemini Code Assist for individuals is powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 artificial intelligence model and can generate entire code blocks, complete code as you write, and provide general coding assistance via a chatbot interface. The free coding tool can be installed in Visual Studio Code, GitHub, and JetBrains developer environments and supports all programming languages in the public domain.

Developers can instruct Gemini Code Assist using natural language, such as asking the coding chatbot to “build me a simple HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and then add a ‘submit’ button.” It currently supports 38 languages and up to 128,000 chat input tokens in the token context window, which is the amount of text (tokens) that can be processed or “remembered” when generating a response.

The free Individual tier seems pretty expansive, but it doesn’t include all of the advanced business-focused features available in the Standard and Enterprise versions of Gemini Code Assist. If you want productivity metrics, integrations with Google Cloud services like BigQuery, or to customize responses using private code data sources then you’ll need to use Google’s paid tiers.