Kiro
Verified Oct 24, 2026 ActiveAWS's spec-driven agentic dev environment: a prompt becomes requirements, a design and sequenced tasks.
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $20/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Free tier is 50 credits a month with open-weight models and Claude Sonnet 4.5. Paid tiers are per user: Pro $20/month for 1,000 credits, Pro+ $40 for 2,000, Pro Max $100 for 5,000, Power $200 for 10,000, with premium models including Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5. Add-on credits cost $0.04 each in packs from $5, expire 12 months after purchase, and monthly plan credits do not roll over; the first upgrade via social login or AWS Builder ID gets a $20 credit.
Use tool ↗About Kiro
Kiro is AWS's coding agent, built around specs rather than a chat log: a prompt is expanded into requirements, an architecture note and an ordered task list that you approve before any code is written, which keeps it steerable on a large codebase. It runs several agents in parallel on your machine or in the cloud, generates property-based tests to catch the edge cases unit tests miss, and hooks fire background jobs such as re-running tests or refreshing docs. It ships as an IDE, a CLI, a web app, a mobile app and an open-source local workspace called Kiro Crew, and routes work to Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT, open-weight models such as DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM and Qwen, or an automatic pick. Everything is metered in credits: 50 a month free, then per-user plans from $20.
- API
- Not confirmed
- Last verified
- Oct 24, 2026
Verified sources
- Pricing page: Free 50 credits with open-weight models and Claude Sonnet 4.5; Pro $20 per user/month for 1,000 credits, Pro+ $40 for 2,000, Pro Max $100 for 5,000, Power $200 for 10,000; add-on credits $0.04 each expiring after 12 months; $20 credit on first upgrade via social login or AWS Builder ID (15 October 2026)kiro.dev ↗
- Home page: spec-driven workflow, parallel agents local or cloud, property-based testing, hooks, Kiro Crew open-source workspace, IDE/CLI/web/mobile surfaces, Claude, OpenAI GPT, DeepSeek, MiniMax, GLM and Qwen models, 'Built and operated by AWS' (15 October 2026)kiro.dev ↗
Is Kiro legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Mar 1, 2019 (7 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Nom-IQ Limited dba Com Laude, looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Amazon, valid until May 4, 2027Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 24, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 24, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2025The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Amazon Web Services, United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Kiro
The spec step is the whole argument: forcing a prompt through requirements, design and a task list before code is written gives you a review point that chat-based assistants never offer, and it holds up better on large codebases. Property-based testing and hooks are real additions rather than checkbox features. Credit metering means the advertised tier price is a floor, not a ceiling.
Pros
- Specs turn a prompt into reviewable requirements, design and ordered tasks
- Property-based test generation catches cases hand-written unit tests miss
- Parallel agents work on separate tasks in the same session
- Hooks run background jobs like test reruns and doc updates automatically
- Available as IDE, CLI, web and mobile across Mac, Windows and Linux
- Free tier of 50 credits a month that does not expire
Cons
- Everything is credit-metered, so heavy agent runs outpace the tier price
- The free 50 credits are enough to evaluate and little else
- Top-up credits cost $0.04 each, which adds up quickly at agent scale
- No public API for driving Kiro from outside its own surfaces
- The spec workflow is overhead on small, well-understood changes
Best for
- Large existing codebases where a chat assistant loses the thread
- Teams that want a reviewable plan before an agent starts editing
- Developers already inside the AWS account and identity ecosystem
Not for
- Quick one-file edits where writing a spec is overhead
- Anyone who wants predictable flat-rate billing rather than credits
Watch out: Credits, not seats, are the real cost driver. A $20 Pro plan buys 1,000 credits and parallel agent runs consume them faster than a single chat session would.
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