Amazon offers its AI coding assistant to start-ups for free
04 Dec 2025
Amazon is giving away its new AI coding assistant, Kiro Pro+, to start-ups with annual sales of $5 million or less.
The offer, announced by AWS CEO Matt Garman at the company's conference, provides free credits for up to a year and is limited to 100 users.
The move comes as part of Amazon's strategy to break into the already crowded market of AI pair programmers.
Strategy to win over start-ups
Market competition
Amazon's Kiro Pro+ will compete with established players like GitHub Copilot, Gemini Code Assist, Cursor, and Claude Code.
However, the e-commerce giant hopes that offering free access at a start-up scale will encourage trials and create long-term loyalty among venture-backed companies.
The move is similar to AWS Activate's strategy of trading credits for early mindshare that later translates into years of cloud spending.
Kiro Pro+ offer details and eligibility
Offer specifics
The Kiro Pro+ offer is aimed at venture-backed companies from pre-seed to Series B.
Start-ups can apply for credits for up to 100 users for a full year, enough to equip a typical seed-stage engineering team or conduct an extensive pilot in a post-Series A/B funding organization.
However, the offer is limited geographically and excludes large European markets like France, Germany, and Italy as well as most of South America and trade sanction regions.
It could save startups thousands of dollars
Cost savings
While Amazon hasn't emphasized pricing comparisons, the free 100-seat usage for a year is significant.
If Kiro Pro+ is priced similarly to other tools in the $20-$30 per user per month range, the credits offered can quickly add up to tens of thousands of dollars for an early-stage team.
This makes it a financially attractive option for start-ups looking to leverage AI-assisted coding tools.
Amazon's distribution advantage and potential challenges
Market dynamics
Amazon's distribution and default in AWS accounts give it an edge over its competitors.
If Kiro can integrate with popular AWS workflows, it could replace or complement existing AI assistant technologies.
However, the real challenge lies in proving day-to-day utility without hallucinating, missing context, or slowing down IDE.
Start-ups already using Copilot or Cursor may question the accuracy of Kiro's suggestions and its understanding of their codebase.
What to consider before adopting Kiro Pro+
Adoption considerations
CTOs and heads of engineering should consider policy controls, SSO and role mapping, repo permissions, and CI integration before adopting Kiro Pro+.
They should also benchmark Kiro against their current tools by running an experiment across a subset of languages and frameworks.
This would help them assess suggestion acceptance rates, time to complete common tasks, bug escape rates; get developer feedback about latency and IDE fit.
