Introduction:
Most articles comparing AI coding assistants still list Amazon Q Developer alongside GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code and Gemini Code Assist as if it were a live, growing product. As of writing, it is not. AWS is retiring it, has already cut off new signups, and has already moved its newest models off the product entirely.
This guide covers what actually happened, on what dates, what Amazon Q Developer still does for existing subscribers, what its AWS-native successor Kiro costs and does differently, and — because you asked about multi-cloud integration — why the honest answer for both products is that they barely leave AWS at all. If you are also weighing OpenAI's tool, see our coverage of ChatGPT Codex, which took the opposite path and expanded onto three clouds this year.
In this article
The sunset: what happened and when
AWS published the end-of-support announcement on its DevOps blog on 30 April 2026. The timeline has three fixed dates, and two of them have already passed:
- 15 May 2026New Amazon Q Developer signups blocked. New Free Tier account creation via Builder ID, and new paid subscription creation through the AWS Console, both closed. Existing subscriptions continue and can still add seats.
- 29 May 2026Claude Opus 4.6 removed from Q Developer Pro. Opus 4.5 and other existing models stay available, but the newest coding models — including Opus 4.7 — became exclusive to Kiro from this date onward.
- 30 April 2027Full end-of-support for the Q Developer IDE plugins (VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, Eclipse) and all paid subscriptions, including code transformation. AWS says it will keep the plugin listings live on all four IDE marketplaces with a deprecation notice, and will keep pushing critical bugfixes through the transition window, but active development stops.
What is not affected. Amazon Q Developer inside the AWS Management Console, AWS documentation, the AWS Console Mobile App, and the Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations continue unimpacted. The sunset is specifically about the IDE plugins, the CLI, and the paid subscription tiers that powered them.
AWS's own framing for the move: "the most impactful AI developer experiences go far beyond code generation and completion," pointing at the kind of structured project understanding and agentic orchestration a completion plugin was not built to do. The replacement, Kiro, had already been previewed in July 2025 and reached general availability on 7 May 2026 — eight days before Q Developer stopped taking new customers.
What Amazon Q Developer still does
If you already have an active subscription, nothing changes for you today beyond the Opus cutoff. The product as it exists:
- Inline code suggestions across 15+ languages in VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, and Eclipse, plus the AWS Console.
- Agentic chat for multi-step feature implementation, bug fixes and test writing, counted as "agentic requests" against your monthly allowance.
- Code transformation — automated Java (8/11/17 → 17/21) and .NET version upgrades, the feature most large enterprises actually bought Q Developer for.
- Security scanning, including real-time detection of hardcoded secrets during autocomplete.
- Deep AWS-native context: CloudFormation, Lambda, IAM-aware suggestions, and console error diagnostics.
None of this is being actively developed further. Treat it as a maintenance-mode tool for the remainder of its supported life, not a platform to build new workflows on.
Pricing while it lasts
| Tier | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | A real, perpetual plan, not a trial: unlimited inline completions, 50 agentic requests/month, 1,000 lines/month of Java code transformation, chat, and security scanning. No IP indemnity, no admin dashboard. |
| Pro | $19/user/month | Higher agentic-request limits, 4,000 lines/month of code transformation per user (pooled at the AWS payer-account level, then $0.003 per additional line), IP indemnity, IAM Identity Center-based team management, and an admin dashboard. |
Pro is no longer purchasable by new customers as a net-new subscription — existing Pro subscribers can keep adding seats until the April 2027 deadline, but a team starting from zero today cannot sign up.
Kiro: the actual successor
Kiro is not an updated version of Q Developer. It is a separate, VS Code (Code OSS)-based IDE built around a genuinely different idea: spec-driven development. Instead of turning a prompt straight into code, Kiro first produces a structured spec — requirements, an architectural design that surfaces trade-offs, and a sequenced task list — which you review and adjust before any code is written. Agents then implement the tasks, in parallel where the plan allows, and Kiro checks the result against the spec using property-based testing rather than a handful of example assertions. Supporting mechanics around that core: steering files that carry your coding standards and constraints across the IDE, CLI and web interface; hooks that trigger automated agents on events like a file save or a test run; persistent memory across sessions; and native Model Context Protocol (MCP) support, including a GA AWS MCP Server that gives the agent IAM-scoped, real-time access to your AWS environment.
Kiro pricing
| Tier | Price | Credits/month |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 credits |
| Pro | $20/user/month | 1,000 credits |
| Pro+ | $40/user/month | 2,000 credits |
| Pro Max | $100/user/month | 5,000 credits |
| Power | $200/user/month | 10,000 credits |
Overage is a flat $0.04 per credit beyond your monthly allocation — no rate-limit lockout, just a predictable per-credit charge, which is a meaningfully more transparent model than a hard weekly cap. A full spec-driven feature build costs roughly 15–25 credits depending on complexity, so the Free tier covers two or three feature builds a month and Pro covers roughly 40–65. Kiro's reasoning runs on Anthropic's Claude models served through Amazon Bedrock, alongside open-weight and OpenAI model options, and it supports IAM Identity Center SSO for workforce identity.
The honest caveat, from developers who have actually shipped with it. Kiro's spec-driven workflow is a real differentiator, not a gimmick, and it solves a problem — AI code that quietly violates existing architecture — that speed-first tools like Cursor ignore. But its autocomplete lags the category leaders, the credit economics punish exploratory coding, and the hooks/steering ecosystem is still thin. Several reviewers recommend running it alongside an existing tool for feature-level work rather than replacing your daily driver outright.
Pros and cons
| Strengths | Trade-offs |
|---|---|
| Amazon Q Developer Free is a genuinely usable perpetual plan, not a time-boxed trial — the most generous free tier of any tool covered on this site. | The product has a fixed, published expiry date. Any new investment in Q Developer workflows is investment in something that stops receiving updates now and stops working entirely in April 2027. |
| Code transformation (Java and .NET version upgrades) remains one of the most concretely useful, narrowly-scoped agentic features in the category. | New signups are already closed. If you have not started a subscription, you cannot start one — the only path in is Kiro. |
| Kiro's spec-first workflow catches architectural mistakes before code is written, with property-based testing verifying the result against the spec. | Kiro's credit-based billing is unforgiving for exploratory or trial-and-error coding; a single complex feature build can burn a large share of a Free or Pro allocation. |
| Kiro's transparent $0.04/credit overage avoids the hard rate-limit lockouts that frustrate users of some competing agentic tools. | Kiro's structural advantage — deep, native AWS context — disappears completely if your infrastructure runs on Azure or Google Cloud. |
| Both products carry IP indemnity (Pro tier) and IAM Identity Center integration for enterprise identity management. | Kiro is closed-source outside its VS Code (Code OSS) base; the core spec engine and agent system are proprietary AWS technology, unlike Claude Code or the open-source Gemini CLI. |
Cloud integration: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, OCI
This is the section every reader asking about Amazon Q Developer actually needs answered plainly: neither Q Developer nor Kiro is a multi-cloud tool, and treating this as an oversight misreads the product. It is AWS's answer to "how do we make our own console, services and IAM the best possible place to write code" — depth on one cloud, not breadth across four.
Amazon Web Services: the native case
This is where both products are actually built to live:
- IAM-aware suggestions and IAM Identity Center for team management — identity, access and licensing all live in the same control plane as the rest of your AWS account.
- CloudFormation and infrastructure-as-code context — Q Developer and Kiro both understand AWS resource definitions well enough to generate and modify them directly.
- Kiro's AWS MCP Server (GA) gives the agent live, IAM-scoped access to your actual AWS environment rather than a static training-time snapshot — it can check what a Lambda function or S3 bucket policy actually looks like right now.
- Bedrock as the inference layer. Kiro's reasoning runs on Claude models served through Amazon Bedrock, so usage draws on the same managed inference infrastructure AWS sells to everyone else, with the same regional and compliance posture.
- Console-embedded Q Developer (unaffected by the sunset) continues answering questions and troubleshooting directly inside the AWS Management Console, Docs and mobile app.
Region support is worth checking before you plan a workforce rollout: Q Developer Pro for personal Builder ID accounts is supported only in US East (N. Virginia), while IAM Identity Center workforce users depend on which region your Identity Center instance runs in, with opt-in regions excluded from Pro subscription entirely.
Microsoft Azure
There is no Azure-native version of either product, and no path to route inference through Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry. What actually works: the IDE extensions run on any developer laptop regardless of deploy target, so a developer on an Azure-hosted repo can still use Q Developer or Kiro for the coding itself. Kiro's MCP support means you can connect it to Azure context through third-party or self-hosted MCP servers exposing Azure Resource Manager, Azure DevOps, or your own platform APIs — but that is you building the bridge, not AWS providing one. If your infrastructure is Azure-first, this is the weakest fit in the entire category covered on this site.
Google Cloud
The same pattern holds. No native integration, no Vertex AI routing, no console presence. The practical path is identical to Azure: use the IDE and CLI locally, connect MCP servers for GCP context if you need it, and accept that the tool's best features — CloudFormation generation, IAM-aware suggestions, the AWS MCP Server — simply have no equivalent to invoke. Teams primarily on GCP are far better served by Gemini Code Assist, which has the mirror-image problem: deep on its own cloud, absent everywhere else.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
No integration exists, and none is likely — Kiro's entire value proposition is AWS-native depth, which is structurally incompatible with an OCI-first architecture. If your team runs Oracle Database, Java and Fusion workloads, Oracle Code Assist or a portable agent like Codex (which does have an OCI Universal Credits path) are the realistic options.
Side-by-side
| Capability | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | OCI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native console/IDE integration | Yes — deep | No | No | No |
| Inference hosted in-cloud | Yes (Bedrock) | No | No | No |
| Infra-as-code awareness | CloudFormation, CDK | Via MCP only | Via MCP only | None |
| Identity integration | IAM Identity Center native | Local IDE only | Local IDE only | Local IDE only |
| Realistic recommendation | Kiro (Q Developer if grandfathered) | Copilot, Claude Code, or Codex on Azure OpenAI | Gemini Code Assist | Oracle Code Assist, or Codex via Universal Credits |
How Q Developer and Kiro compare to the field
| Tool | Status | Entry price | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Q Developer | Sunsetting — new signups closed, EOL April 2027 | $0 Free / $19 Pro (existing subscribers only) | Existing AWS-native subscribers riding out the transition window |
| Kiro | Current AWS product, GA since May 2026 | $0 Free / $20 Pro | AWS-native teams that want spec-driven, governed feature delivery |
| GitHub Copilot | Active, largest install base | $0 Free / $10 Pro | Teams centred on GitHub, cheapest credible paid entry point |
| ChatGPT Codex | Active, expanding across clouds | $0 Free / $8 Go / $20 Plus | Teams wanting one agent portable across AWS, Azure and OCI |
| Claude Code — our review | Active | $20/mo Pro | Long-horizon agentic work portable across Bedrock, Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry |
| Cursor | Active, largest independent editor | $0 Hobby / $20 Pro | Speed-first iteration, multi-model flexibility, largest community ecosystem |
| Gemini Code Assist | Active, enterprise-only since June 2026 | No individual tier; $19–22.80 Standard | Google Cloud-native teams |
The pattern worth naming: three of the four hyperscalers now sell an AI coding assistant that is genuinely deep on their own cloud and genuinely absent everywhere else — AWS with Kiro, Google with Gemini Code Assist, and Oracle with Oracle Code Assist. The odd one out is Microsoft, whose Copilot has always been cloud-agnostic by design, and OpenAI, which spent 2026 deliberately expanding Codex across all three of the others' clouds. If cross-cloud portability is a hard requirement, Codex or Claude Code are the two realistic choices; if AWS-native depth outweighs that requirement, Kiro is the only tool in this list built for exactly that trade-off.
What to actually do
- Already on Q Developer Pro. Keep it through the transition window, but start evaluating Kiro now rather than at the April 2027 deadline — enterprise security review and team retraining do not happen in the final weeks, and two of three sunset milestones have already passed.
- Starting fresh on AWS. Go straight to Kiro. There is no path to a new Q Developer subscription regardless.
- Heavy on Java or .NET modernization specifically. Confirm whether Kiro has an equivalent to Q Developer's code transformation feature before you assume parity — this was Q Developer's most concretely valuable enterprise feature and is worth a direct check against current Kiro documentation.
- Multi-cloud, or not primarily on AWS. Neither Q Developer nor Kiro is the right tool. Look at Codex (portable across AWS, Azure, OCI) or Claude Code (portable across Bedrock, Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry) instead.
- Want the AWS console experience specifically. That part is unaffected by any of this — Q Developer inside the Management Console, Docs and Slack/Teams integrations keeps working regardless of what you choose for the IDE.
Frequently asked questions
Is Amazon Q Developer being discontinued?
Yes. AWS blocked new signups on 15 May 2026 and will fully end support for the IDE plugins and paid subscriptions on 30 April 2027. Existing subscribers keep access through that date and can continue adding seats, but no new subscriptions can be created.
Can I still sign up for Amazon Q Developer today?
No. New Free Tier account creation via Builder ID and new paid subscription creation through the AWS Console were both closed as of 15 May 2026. Kiro is the only current entry point for new AWS customers.
What is Kiro and is it the same as Amazon Q Developer?
Kiro is AWS's replacement product, not an update to Q Developer. It is a separate VS Code-based IDE built around spec-driven development — producing structured requirements and a task plan before writing code — rather than Q Developer's completion-and-chat model. It reached general availability on 7 May 2026.
How much does Kiro cost?
Free includes 50 credits a month. Paid tiers are Pro at $20/month (1,000 credits), Pro+ at $40 (2,000), Pro Max at $100 (5,000), and Power at $200 (10,000), with overage at a flat $0.04 per credit beyond your allocation.
Does Amazon Q Developer or Kiro work outside AWS?
The IDE and CLI clients run on any machine, and you can connect Kiro to non-AWS context through Model Context Protocol servers you set up yourself. But there is no native Azure, Google Cloud or Oracle Cloud integration, no inference routing through those clouds, and none of the console-level, IAM-aware depth that makes either product valuable on AWS. Both are built specifically for AWS-native teams.
What happens to the AWS Console version of Q Developer?
It is not affected by this sunset. Q Developer inside the AWS Management Console, AWS documentation, the Console Mobile App, and the Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations continue to be available.
Which model does Kiro use?
Kiro's reasoning runs on Anthropic's Claude models served through Amazon Bedrock, with additional open-weight and OpenAI model options available. The newest coding models, including Claude Opus 4.7, are exclusive to Kiro and unavailable on Q Developer Pro since 29 May 2026.
References
- Amazon Q Developer end-of-support announcement — AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog
- Amazon Q Developer pricing — AWS
- Amazon Q Developer Pro Region support — AWS Documentation
- Kiro — official product site
- Kiro on GitHub
Pricing and feature details for every product mentioned here change frequently, and this article covers a product actively being wound down. Confirm current dates and terms on AWS's own end-of-support page and Kiro's official pricing page before making a migration decision.
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