Last month my Copilot renewal email arrived: $10/month, $120/year. Across my team of three that's $360/year for autocomplete. So I did what any cheap developer does — I spent 30 days running Tabby (self-hosted, open-source AI completion) side-by-side with Copilot to see if free could actually compete.
Short answer: for my daily work, Tabby got 80% of the way there for 0% of the price. Here's the data.
The Setup
# Tabby server — one docker command, runs on my old GTX 3060 box
docker run -it --gpus all -p 8080:8080 \
-v $HOME/.tabby:/data \
tabbyml/tabby serve --model StarCoder-3B --device cuda
VS Code extension points at http://localhost:8080. No account, no telemetry, no API key.
30-Day Results (My Actual Usage)
| Metric | Copilot ($10/mo) | Tabby ($0, self-hosted) |
|---|---|---|
| Acceptance rate | ~31% | ~24% |
| Avg suggestion latency | 180ms | 95ms (local network!) |
| Works offline | ❌ | ✅ |
| Code leaves my machine | Yes (telemetry opt-out, but still) | Never |
| Chat/agent features | Strong | Weak (basic chat) |
| Multi-file context | Yes | Limited |
| Annual cost (3 devs) | $360 | $0 (+electricity ~$15/yr) |
Where Tabby Actually Won
Latency. Local inference on my LAN beats a round trip to GitHub's servers. 95ms average vs 180ms — completions feel snappier, which sounds trivial but changed how often I actually used them.
Privacy, for real this time. I work on a client codebase with a strict "no third-party code upload" clause. Copilot's business tier handles this legally, but Tabby handles it physically — the model runs in my closet. The client's security review took one sentence.
Offline. Plane, train, dead ISP — Tabby doesn't care.
Where Copilot Still Wins
The 20% gap is real. Copilot's suggestions are smarter about cross-file context and unusual patterns. When I'm writing boilerplate, both are fine. When I'm doing something weird, Copilot's bigger model shows.
Chat and agents. Tabby's chat is basic. Copilot Chat / agent mode is a different product category. (Though I fill this gap with a free open-source alternative that runs against local models — so the total bill stays $0.)
Zero maintenance. My Tabby box needed a driver update mid-month. That's 20 minutes Copilot never asks for.
The Controversial Conclusion
For solo devs and small teams, paid AI autocomplete is becoming a hard sell. The gap between a $10/month cloud subscription and a free local model shrank from "joke" to "acceptable tradeoff" in about 18 months. If your work is 80% routine code — and most of ours is — you're paying $120/year for the 20% that's hard, which you could cover with a free chat tool anyway.
Big teams with compliance contracts? Copilot Business still makes sense. Everyone else should at least run the 30-day experiment. Worst case, you learn what your acceptance rate actually is.
Have you self-hosted your coding assistant? What's your acceptance rate vs Copilot — and what made you switch back (or never go back)?
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