Key findings
- October 15, 2025: Amp Free, an ad-supported tier, launches. From January 8, 2026 it gives up to US$10 a day of usage, including Opus 4.5.
- December 2, 2025: Amp spins out of Sourcegraph as Amp Frontier Corporation, which says Amp is profitable.
- March 5, 2026: the Amp editor extensions for VS Code and Cursor stop working, and users move to the CLI.
- July 18, 2026: monthly subscriptions arrive. By October 2026 Individual (Megawatt) is US$20 per month and Hobby is free with your own keys or subscriptions.
- June to October 2026: orbs, runners, the macOS, iOS, and Android apps, and Puck turn Amp from a terminal agent into an environment for running many agents remotely.
Amp has changed its pricing four times and retired features its early users relied on, so get prices and notice periods for feature changes written into the contract. It launched inside Sourcegraph in May 2025 and is now a separate company. It retired its editor extensions, rebuilt its CLI, and moved agents to cloud machines called orbs.
Four pricing models in eighteen months
Through 2025, Amp billed API-rate usage without a subscription. Practitioners called it pricey, and Amp later acknowledged it cost more than agents on monthly plans. Amp Free launched with ads in October 2025 and stopped requiring training data a week later. From January 2026, it offered up to US$10 a day with Opus 4.5. It closed to new users in February, dropped ads on March 30, 2026, and is now paused.
On July 18, 2026, Amp launched monthly subscriptions with orb time and credits. On September 13, 2026, it removed Amp token fees outside Enterprise for users bringing their own compute and model subscriptions or keys. On October 10, 2026, it added Claude Code mode on Claude Pro or Max.
From editor extension to orbs
On February 19, 2026, Amp announced that its VS Code and Cursor extensions would stop working on March 5. Amp said agents should run unsupervised outside editor sidebars. Tab completions had already ended in January 2026. In May 2026, Amp rebuilt the CLI and replaced handoff with automatic compaction. It also moved the npm package from @sourcegraph/amp to @ampcode/cli.
Since June 30, 2026, agents run in orbs, cloud machines created per thread and billed by the minute. Amp later added runners on users' machines and the four-position Dial of modes. macOS and iOS apps followed, along with Puck, an agent that coordinates other threads, and an Android app arrived on October 27, 2026.
The company behind it
Amp Frontier Corporation announced its spin-out from Sourcegraph on December 2, 2025 and describes itself as an independent agent research lab. It also runs Amp Labs, which places small engineering teams inside companies, and Westpac announced a partnership with Amp Labs in Sydney on August 7, 2026.
Amp states that it removes features it no longer uses and keeps no backward compatibility. Engineers who relied on handoff, the editor extension, or Amp Free saw each one go, so plan for the same with any feature your workflow adopts.
- Ask which features and prices the contract fixes through renewal.
- Ask how much notice Amp gives before retiring a feature your workflow uses.
- Ask which entity processes your data and which providers serve each mode.
Methodology
GILD read Amp's pricing page, documentation, Chronicle announcements, security reference, and about page, Westpac's media release, and the public accounts in GILD's Amp record, all on October 12, 2026. Dates come from each announcement's own publication date.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 16
- Public source
- 4
- Amp news: Amp Free (Oct 15, 2025, with later updates)
- Amp news: The Frontier Is Now Free (Jan 8, 2026)
- Amp news: Amp Free Is Full (Feb 10, 2026)
- Amp news: Amp Free Is Ad-Free (Mar 30, 2026)
- Amp news: Amp Frontier Corporation (Dec 2, 2025)
- Amp news: Tab, Tab, Dead (Jan 15, 2026)
- Amp news: The Coding Agent Is Dead (Feb 19, 2026)
- Amp news: Amp, Rebuilt (May 6, 2026)
- Amp news: npm package changes (May 14, 2026)
- Amp news: Agents in Orbs (Jun 30, 2026)
- Amp news: Subscriptions, At Last (Jul 18, 2026)
- Amp news: Free Agent (Sep 13, 2026)
- Amp news: Use Your Claude Plan in Amp (Oct 10, 2026)
- Amp: About
- Amp pricing
- Amp news: Banking on the Frontier (Jul 29, 2026)
- Westpac media release: Westpac and Amp Frontier to partner on AI engineering (Aug 7, 2026)
- Hacker News: discussion of Amp's spin-out from Sourcegraph (Dec 8, 2025)
- Hacker News: on Amp removing handoff (Aug 14, 2026)
- Jibran: I keep coming back to Amp Code (Feb 8, 2026)