"Copilot" isn't a product. It's a label Microsoft has stuck on more than eighty different things by now: a Copilot in Windows, one buried in Word, Excel, and Teams, a Security Copilot, a Copilot Studio for building your own agents, and somewhere in there, GitHub has its own Copilot too. These aren't variations on a theme. They're separate products built by separate teams for separate jobs, and most of the confusion inside IT departments right now comes from treating them as one thing.

We'll clear that up in the first few minutes: what each Copilot actually does, and who it's actually for. Then we drop the other seventy nine and spend the rest of the hour on the one that matters if you write code, GitHub Copilot, and specifically the tier most developers never look at twice: free.

Here's why that's worth your time. In June 2026, GitHub quietly rebuilt the whole pricing model around credits. Code completions and Next Edit suggestions are now unlimited, full stop, on every plan including free. Chat, agent mode, and premium models draw against a monthly credit allowance instead. That's not the free tier you tried in 2024 and shrugged off. It's close to a different product wearing the same name.

So we'll test it. No paid plan, no upsell, just VS Code and the free tier: chat for explaining and fixing real code, agent mode let loose on a small multi file task with nobody holding its hand. You'll walk out knowing exactly where free earns its keep, and exactly where it taps out.