Tech Desk 
Feb 25, 2025
Google has made a free version of Gemini Code Assist, an artificial intelligence (AI) coding tool, available globally for solo developers.
Alphabet-owned Google revealed 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.
Google’s Senior Director of Product Management, Ryan J. Salva stated: “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.”
“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,” he added.
GitHub Copilot, the most immediate competitor to Gemini Code Assist, which provides a free user tier that’s limited to 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot Chat messages each month.
By contrast, Google is offering up to 180,000 code completions per month, which it describes as “a ceiling so high that even today’s most dedicated professional developers would be hard-pressed to exceed it.”
Gemini Code Assist for individuals is powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 artificial intelligence model, having the capability to generate entire code blocks, complete code as you write, and provide general coding assistance via a chatbot interface.
The free coding tool can be downloaded 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, like asking the coding chatbot to “build me a simple HTML form with fields for name, email, and message, and then add a ‘submit’ button.”
Currently, it 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 is said 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 customise responses using private code data sources then you’ll need to use Google’s paid tiers.
