What's free
Included with any GitHub account via the Copilot tier
Rate limits
Copilot Free: ~15 RPM / 150 RPD on "low" tier models, 8K input / 4K output tokens per request. Higher Copilot tiers raise the ceiling
The catch
Scoped by GitHub to experimentation/prototyping, not production traffic
Free models · sample
cohere/cohere-command-adeepseek/deepseek-r1deepseek/deepseek-r1-0528meta/llama-3.2-11b-vision-instructmeta/llama-3.2-90b-vision-instructmicrosoft/phi-4mistral-ai/codestral-2501openai/gpt-4.1A sample of models reachable on the free tier — the live catalog changes. Pull the current set with GET https://models.github.ai/inference/models.
Quickstart — chat completions
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(base_url="https://models.github.ai/inference", api_key="<YOUR_FREE_API_KEY>")
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="cohere/cohere-command-a",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)…or with curl:
curl https://models.github.ai/inference/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"cohere/cohere-command-a","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'