Amazon Just Dropped a Bomb on the AI Coding War: Kiro Pro+ Is Now Free for Startups
Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash
Source
techcrunch.com
Published
Dec 4, 2025
Category
Software & Apps
Executive summary
Amazon is offering its new AI code editor Kiro to startups for free. Its goal is to stand out among Cursor Claude Code AI-powered VSCode derivatives like vibe-coding.
Analyst insight
Amazon is offering Kiro free of charge to startups for one year, aiming to get them accustomed to using it. This way, it plans to enter the Vibe-coding market. Offering something for free is a classic but risky way to gain market share. Amazon has repeatedly used this “give cheaply, connect, and grow” model during the AWS era. Once people get used to a code editor, they don't want to use other code editors. Amazon knows this very well and is aiming to enter the market this way. This move is quite powerful in the short term, but in the long term, Kiro needs to have very high product performance to compete with code editors like Cursor and Claude Code. Otherwise, users will return to editors like Cursor and Claude once the free version ends.
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