For some open source developers, students, or hobbiests who don't have a job, yes.

Also I think the main point is just the fact that such a useful tool is so monopolized currently. Would be nice to know that if Microsoft randomly decided to triple the price or do something shady with it, there would be fallback options. Preferably something open sourced and community oriented

Students get 1 year of copilot for free. But it’s like heroin: once you got hooked on it, you cannot live without it.

Then it is bad heroin. I used it when it was free for quite some time, I found it useful once and nice in some other cases. I can use it now for free because I accidentally did significant open source contributions, but decided not to use it as it is not that useful in the end.

I can't find anything supporting that students only get 1 year, just a general "students get GHC for free" statement.

I'm assuming it's part of the Student Developer Pack:

https://education.github.com/pack

I've gotten this before, but it was a little tricky as I had to get someone from my school to submit credentials to GitHub in order for us students to have access to this. Not sure if the process is still the same. I assume if you go to a large university this has probably already been done for you

Also I don't actually see Copilot listed there...

The way it worked for me is I went to the form to sign up, put up my college ID card up to a webcam, submit, get an automated approval about 10 seconds later, then specifically go to the GCP page and "purchase" it for free.

Tabnine has been doing this for years longer than copilot with more users and better ratings. Not a monopoly (except that MSFT has so much marketing clout). The LLM space that we build on has gotten much more diverse after MSFT bought OpenAI and closed collaboration for many industry participants including ourselves. (We used to run on GPT2 but changed to an agnostic strategy that can use any LLM when MSFT would not let us use GPT3) Take a look at the new innovation with T5 from SFDC, AI21, Google, Meta all building powerful models. Transparently we need your help in ensuring that this is not a monopoly.

Not to forget currency rate in other countries, most SaaS is charged based on USD.

This coffees just add up and then there is no more left for real coffee

also some of us are frugal and make our own coffee. probably costs me less than 7c a cup.