More room to explore: $20 paid tier sign-up bonus

We want every developer to have enough runway to really try Kiro before deciding if it's right for them. Starting today, we're introducing a bigger sign-up bonus credit for new paid subscribers when they first upgrade, and the existing Kiro Free tier remains unchanged.

The Kiro paid plans give you access to the latest state of the art models, with appropriate limits for day-to-day coding work. We want users to fully experience Kiro as a daily driver, and that’s why when you now upgrade to any Kiro paid plan for the first time, you now get a bonus $20 credited toward your subscription. That's 1,000 credits worth of usage, double the previous 500. You get access to premium models, including Claude Opus 4.7, from day one.

You will need a valid credit card to get started. The bonus is available to users who upgrade for the first time to any Kiro paid plan using social login or Builder ID (not AWS Identity Center or third party identity providers).

Here’s how it works. Kiro processes paid subscriptions on the 1st of each calendar month. Say you upgrade to Kiro Pro ($20/month) on June 15th. You’d get a prorated credit of $10 for the remaining 15 days in June. On July 1st, your card gets charged the July subscription price minus your remaining trial credit: $20 − $10 = $10. After that, standard billing kicks in. This approach makes it affordable to fully test Kiro out, while helping us maintain the quality of service everyone depends on.

Free users get access to use Claude Sonnet 4.5, our Auto agent, and a strong lineup of open weight models, including Qwen3 Coder Next, DeepSeek v3.2, and MiniMax 2.1. These are genuinely capable models, and low credit multipliers means you can get surprisingly good usage out of the free tier. Qwen3 Coder Next scores above 70% on SWE-Bench Verified. DeepSeek v3.2 handles complex agentic workflows well. MiniMax 2.1 is strong across multiple languages and frontend work. We are constantly adding more open weight models, so the free tier is only getting better.

Signing up to the free tier doesn’t require a credit card. Usage on the free tier is rate limited and subject to a weekly quota. Check the docs for the specifics. Premium models like Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 are available when you upgrade to a paid plan. Current users on the free tier will not be affected by this update, so if you signed up before today and haven’t gone though the original 500 bonus credits, you can continue to use them. New users signing up today will not get the 500 bonus credits on signing up, but can rather take advantage of the paid tier $20 worth of bonus credits instead.

We’ve been watching how developers use Kiro for the first time, and two things became clear. First, 500 credits wasn’t always enough for someone to build something meaningful and form a real opinion. Second, the open weight model offerings have matured to the point where free tier users can get genuinely good results without needing frontier models for every task.

So we doubled the bonus credits, kept full model access for paid subscribers from the start, and gave free tier users a practical set of models that work well for small projects and lighter usage.

We know there are many options in this space today, and we want to offer developers evaluating Kiro ample credits and access to the best models to make an informed decision. And developers who aren’t quite ready to try the full Kiro experience get cost-effective model options on the free tier that hold up for real work. Everyone gets enough room to build.