Hobby projects only, on the free plan in VS Code. Completions just stopped appearing about two weeks into the month while chat carried on working for a bit longer, and nothing in the editor told me why. I reinstalled twice before it occurred to me that I might have simply run out. Where do you actually see the counter, and does everything reset on the same day?
I ran into the same wall and moved completions to a local model, which has been better than I expected for the boring half of the job.
Setup was Ollama with a small code model and the continue extension, on a laptop with 16GB of RAM. It is not as good at the clever multi-line suggestions, and it's noticeably better at the ones that are basically typing — closing a struct, writing the obvious error branch, filling in a repetitive block. That's most of what I was using the quota on anyway.
Zero quota, works offline, and my fans get loud. Fair trade for hobby projects.
16GB is what I've got, so this is worth an evening. If it handles the boring completions and I stop rationing the good ones, that's most of the problem solved for nothing.
Set expectations low for the first hour. The small models are noticeably worse at the first suggestion and fine once you've given them a file's worth of context.
I reinstalled three times, cleared the extension cache, and signed out and back in twice before I found the usage page. Two hours gone.
What I'd tell anyone on any free tier: before you debug the client, check the meter. Free tiers almost never fail loudly — they degrade or go quiet, because a loud failure looks bad in a screenshot.
Mild disagreement with the local-model plan for your case. If you're running out mid-month, you're using it enough that the friction is now the expensive part.
I spent about six weeks rationing, watching a counter and deciding whether a suggestion was worth spending, and the mental overhead of that was worth more than the subscription. Paid, stopped thinking about it, moved on. That's obviously not the answer if the budget is genuinely zero, but if it's "I'd rather not," reconsider what the rationing costs you.
It's genuinely closer to "I'd rather not" than zero budget. The rationing point is fair — I'd already caught myself not asking things because I was saving requests.
That behaviour is the actual cost of a free tier and nobody puts it on the pricing page. Worth trying one paid month and seeing whether you write differently.
Free tier, monthly allowance, resets on your billing date. The counter is in your account settings on the web, not in the editor. Check there before touching the extension.
@logfile_lena · 2d ago
You didn't break it, you spent it. The free plan gives a fixed monthly allowance of completions and a separate, much smaller allowance of chat requests, which is why the two stopped at different times.
The counter lives in your GitHub account settings under the Copilot section rather than in the editor, which is a genuinely bad piece of design — the place you use it is not the place that tells you. The Copilot status icon in the VS Code status bar will also show you when you're out, but only once you already are.
Allowances run on your monthly billing cycle, not the first of the calendar month, so check the date shown on that page rather than assuming.
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