Common Questions

Kiro is an agentic IDE that helps you go from prototype to production with spec-driven development. From simple to complex tasks, Kiro works alongside you to turn prompts into detailed specs, then into working code, docs, and tests—so what you build is exactly what you want and ready to share with your team. Kiro’s agents help you solve challenging problems and automate tasks like generating documentation and unit tests. With Kiro, you can build beyond prototypes while being in the driver’s seat every step of the way.

Developing with specs keeps the fun of vibe coding, but fixes some of its limitations: vibe coding can require too much guidance on complex tasks or when building on top of large codebases, and it can misinterpret context. When implementing a task with vibe coding, it’s difficult to keep track of all the decisions that were made along the way, and document them for your team. By using specs, Kiro works alongside you to define requirements, system design, and tasks to be implemented before writing any code. This approach explicitly documents the reasoning and implementation decisions, so Kiro can implement more complex tasks in fewer shots.

Kiro works as a standalone agentic IDE. Download the installer for your operating system, and log in with GitHub, Google, AWS Builder ID, or AWS IAM Identity Center. You do not need an AWS account to use Kiro. For more, see [documentation](/docs).

Kiro supports a variety of programming languages that developers use in their day to day work. This list includes, but is not limited to Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Go, Rust, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, C, C++, shell scripting, SQL, Scala, JSON, YAML, and HCL.

Kiro is currently optimized for English language conversations and interactions. Support for additional languages is coming soon.

Kiro is based on Code OSS, so you can import your VS Code settings, themes, and Open VSX compatible plugins in the Kiro onboarding flow.

Your content will not be used for training any underlying foundation models (FMs) if you have a Kiro Pro, Pro+, or Power subscription and access Kiro through the AWS IAM Identity Center. If you access Kiro under the Free Tier, are in the two-week Free Trial period, or have a Pro, Pro+, or Power subscription but access Kiro through AWS Builder ID or a social login provider, your content may be used to enhance and improve the quality of underlying FMs, including code snippets, conversations, and file contents open in the IDE. You can opt out of content collection at any time using the opt-out mechanism described in our [documentation](/docs/privacy-and-security/data-protection/#opt-out-of-data-sharing-in-the-ide). For more information, see [Service Improvement](/docs/privacy-and-security/data-protection/#service-improvement).

No. Amazon Q Developer Pro customers who use Kiro during the preview period will retain their Q Developer Pro benefits by logging into Kiro with the same credentials used for Amazon Q Developer Pro. Kiro will not collect their content for service improvement.

Kiro offers flexible pricing tiers designed around how developers use Kiro. New users can start with the perpetual Kiro Free tier, which includes 50 credits. You can upgrade to paid tiers ranging from Pro ($20/month), Pro+ ($40/month), to Power ($200/month) for increased capacity. Paid tiers include flexible overages available at $0.04 per additional credit. Kiro prices shown do not include applicable taxes or duties (such as VAT or sales tax) unless explicitly noted. Note that if you have a Japanese billing address, Japanese Consumption Tax will apply to your Kiro usage. The amount of tax collected depends on many factors, including, but not limited to, your Tax Registration Number (“TRN” or Tax ID), and billing address.

By default, your prompts are processed by Auto an agent that uses a mix of different frontier models such as Sonnet 4 combined with specialized models that are experts in specific tasks, intent detection, caching, and other techniques to give you a better balance of quality, latency, and costs. You can also choose to have your prompts processed exclusively by Sonnet 4.

The first time you get access to Kiro (off the waitlist), you will receive 500 bonus credits usable within 14 days, whatever plan you sign up for, including Kiro Free.

A credit is a unit of work in response to user prompts. Simple prompts can consume less than 1 credit. More complex prompts, such as executing a spec task, typically cost more than 1 credit. Additionally, different models consume credits at different rates, with a prompt executed via Sonnet 4 costing more credits than executing it with Auto. For example, a given task that consumes X credits to execute in Auto, will cost you 1.3X credits to execute via Sonnet 4. Credits are metered to the second decimal point, so the least number of credits a task can consume is 0.01 credits.

Any prompt you ask Kiro to execute, whether in vibe mode or spec mode, as well as spec refinement, task execution, and agent hook execution, will consume credits.

You can see the monthly credit limits for your plan, the number of credits used, and credits remaining in your subscription dashboard accessible in the Kiro IDE. Credit usage is updated at least every 5 minutes.

Yes, on paid plans, you can enable overage to continue using Kiro past your monthly limits. Additional credits are $0.04 each, billed at month-end based on actual over-cap usage. For example, if you're on the Pro tier and use 1,100 credits (100 over your limit), you'll be charged an additional $4 on your next bill. Overage is disabled by default and must be enabled in Settings before it applies. Once you turn overages on, and for as long as you remain on a paid plan, overages stay on. Once you downgrade to the Kiro Free tier, overages will be disabled, and you need to turn them back on when you are back on a paid plan.

No, subscriptions and usage limits are calculated per individual user. For team usage, each developer needs their own subscription. Team billing and management features are coming soon.

Usage limits reset at the start of each billing month. Unused credits do not roll over to the next month.

We accept all major credit cards.

Currently, you can purchase a Kiro paid plan with a billing address in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong SAR, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States of America. More countries or regions will be added soon.