It has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the subscription is better value than Claude Code, but hard to tell.
It supports MCP as well.
Amazon Q also has a VC Code and IntelliJ Idea plugin too, Kiro goes beyond what you can do as a plugin in VS Code though, similar to why Cursor had to fork VS Code.
That sounds too good to be true, and it seems like they are indeed introducing a usage system similar to their competitors next month?
> Starting August 1, 2025, we’re introducing a new pricing plan for Amazon Q Developer designed to make things simpler and more valuable for developers.
> Pro Tier: Expanded limits $19/mo. per user
> 1,000 agentic requests per month included (starting 8/1/2025)
Q CLI has so many issues though, injects so much junk into you shell profiles it can slow down your terminal invocations by seconds, and it doesn't support standard streamableHttp / SSE MCP servers.
just turn those off, it's just 2 includes one at the top and one at the bottom of your shell... file a ticket about making it optional or not. I believe that the shell integration / autocomplete is where they started the product so it's probably one of those core features in the product team's minds.
I generally like the integration but in some cases it's getting in the way of other ai that is runnin q to quit and all of a sudden its in q... I renamed it to amazonq and removed it from my zshrc and added it as a command to integrate, amazonqinit
It has a pretty decent free tier, and maybe the subscription is better value than Claude Code, but hard to tell.
It supports MCP as well.
Amazon Q also has a VC Code and IntelliJ Idea plugin too, Kiro goes beyond what you can do as a plugin in VS Code though, similar to why Cursor had to fork VS Code.