Self-Hosted GitHub Copilot Alternative: Code with Ollama for Free

GitHub Copilot is ten dollars a month and your code goes to a third party. Both are fine until they're not. If you write proprietary code, work in a regulated industry, or just don't want to ship every keystroke to Microsoft, there's a free, local alternative that runs entirely on your laptop.

This post walks through the setup. End to end, twenty minutes.

The stack

Ollama — the local model runner.

Continue.dev — a VS Code extension that talks to Ollama.

A code-focused LLM — qwen2.5-coder:7b for speed, qwen2.5-coder:32b for quality.

That's it. No API keys, no monthly bill, no telemetry.

Why this actually works in 2026

Local code models have closed the gap. Qwen2.5-Coder 32B benchmarks within five points of Claude Sonnet on HumanEval. The 7B variant is fast enough to autocomplete in real time on a 16 GB MacBook M2.…