Credits & Pricing

Kiro bills in credits: Free is $0 for 50 a month, and paid plans run from Pro at $20 for 1,000 up to Power at $200 for 10,000. A credit measures work done rather than text processed, and the same task can cost eighty-eight times more or less depending on one dropdown setting, which is what the rest of this page is about.

Most people meet Kiro’s pricing page, see five plans and a credit number, and assume credits work like API tokens. They don’t. This page explains the model well enough that you can estimate a month before it happens.

What a credit actually is

Simple definition. A credit Kiro's unit of billing: one unit of agent work performed in response to a prompt, billed fractionally. is a unit of work the agent does in response to a prompt. Not a message, not a token, not a minute. A short question (“what does this function return?”) costs less than one credit. A big piece of work, like executing one task from a spec’s tasks.md, typically costs more than one.

Analogy. A taxi meter, not a bus ticket. A bus ticket charges the same whatever the ride; a meter charges for distance and time. Kiro’s meter runs on how much work your request causes: how many files the agent reads, how many edits it makes, how many commands it runs and re-checks.

Three mechanical facts worth knowing:

• Billing is fractional, in increments of 0.01 credits. You are not rounded up to a whole credit for asking a one-line question.
• One unified pool. Since October 2025 every request type draws from the same credit balance. Older articles describe separate vibe-request and spec-request limits; that split is gone.
• Autocomplete isn’t on the meter. Kiro’s official FAQ defines billable work as prompts you ask Kiro to execute (vibe or spec), spec refinement, task execution, and agent hook execution. Inline suggestions as you type aren’t on that list; the meter runs on agentic requests.

In short: credit = one unit of agent work; fractional; one shared pool; autocomplete is free.

The five plans

Prices are per user, per month, verified against kiro.dev/pricing on the review date at the bottom of this page.

Plan	Price	Credits / month	What it unlocks
Free	$0	50	Sonnet 4.5 + open-weight models only
Pro	$20	1,000	All premium models, Kiro Web, overage allowed
Pro+	$40	2,000	Same, with headroom for daily professional use
Pro Max	$100	5,000	Added June 2026; for heavy or premium-model use
Power	$200	10,000	Highest individual ceiling

A few things the table can’t show:

• Going over costs $0.04 per credit either way: individual plans top up with add-on packs, and team plans can let admins enable automatic overage. The Free tier simply stops at 50 until the month resets.
• Add-on credit packs run from $5 (125 credits) up to $100, for when you’d rather top up than change plans. Unlike the monthly allowance, pack credits stay valid for 12 months.
• Kiro Web (app.kiro.dev) requires a paid subscription. It left preview on September 1, 2026 and is now generally available on Pro, Pro+, Pro Max, and Power. The Free tier is IDE and CLI only.
• One pool across surfaces. Credits are consumed the same regardless of where the work happens, so the IDE, the CLI, Kiro Web, the iOS app, and Kiro Crew all draw from the same monthly balance. Crew is Apache 2.0 software with no separate price, but its model calls go through kiro-cli, so its work spends your credits like anything else.
• Team plans mirror the individual prices and add consolidated billing, usage analytics, SAML/SCIM single sign-on through AWS IAM Identity Center, and organization management. Same credits, different administration.
• Usage export. Since September 1, 2026, usage metrics can be exported to OpenTelemetry, which gives administrators per-user adoption and credit consumption in whatever observability stack they already run. That is the answer to “who is actually spending this” for a team lead.

Notice that every paid tier prices credits identically: $20 ÷ 1,000, $40 ÷ 2,000, $100 ÷ 5,000, $200 ÷ 10,000 all come to $0.02 per credit. That single number is what makes the overage rule below so easy to reason about.

Model multipliers: the part everyone misses

Your credit balance drains at a rate set by the model you have selected. Every model carries a multiplier A per-model factor applied to credit consumption, expressed relative to Auto at 1.0x. relative to Auto, which is defined as 1.0x.

Take one moderately involved task — say, implementing a spec task that touches four files and runs the test suite twice — and assume it costs 10 credits on Auto. The same task, same result, different model:

Model	Multiplier	That same task costs
Qwen3 Coder Next	0.05x	~0.5 credits
Claude Haiku 4.5	0.4x	~4 credits
Auto (router)	1.0x	10 credits
Claude Sonnet 5	1.3x	~13 credits
Claude Opus 5	2.2x	~22 credits
GPT-5.6 Sol	4.4x	~44 credits

That is an 88x spread between the cheapest and the most expensive option for identical work, and it widens to 176x on the long-context rate explained just below. No other habit you can change comes close to mattering this much. The full multiplier table for every available model lives in Choosing a Model.

GPT-5.6 is priced in two tiers, and nothing else in Kiro is. Since 14 September 2026 the GPT-5.6 family reads up to 1M tokens of context, and what you pay depends on how large the request is: up to 272K tokens you pay the short context rate (Sol 4.4x, Terra 2.2x, Luna 1.1x), and above 272K tokens you pay exactly double it (8.8x, 4.4x, 2.2x). Every other model in Kiro bills at one flat rate whatever you send it. The practical consequence is that a long session, or a task that pulls in a large part of the codebase, can cross the 272K line and double your rate with nothing on screen to announce it.

In short: the model dropdown is the main dial on your monthly bill; Auto is the sane default.

Bonuses when you start

Two one-time sweeteners, both easy to miss:

• New users get 500 bonus credits, valid for 14 days. That’s ten months of Free-tier allowance, expiring in two weeks — so use it on something real. A full spec-driven feature, not a tour.
• The first upgrade from Free applies a $20 credit to your first paid month. Pro’s first month effectively costs nothing.

Three rules that bite

Credits do not roll over. An unused balance disappears at the monthly reset. Nobody banks credits for a big month later; if you finish a month at 200 of 1,000, those 800 are gone. Plan for your typical month, not your worst one.

Overage is exactly double the tier price. Every paid tier sells credits at $0.02; overage sells them at $0.04. Concretely: if you’re on Pro ($20 for 1,000) and consistently use 2,000, you pay $20 plus 1,000 × $0.04 = $60 a month. Pro+ gives you the same 2,000 credits for $40. The add-on packs price the same way — $5 for 125 credits is also $0.04 per credit.

Subscriptions are per individual. A plan belongs to one person; you can’t share a Power seat across a team. That’s what the team plans and their consolidated billing are for.

Which plan fits you?

The daily-burn figures below are planning heuristics for sizing a plan, not published figures — your real usage depends on how large your tasks are. Do the arithmetic with your own numbers after a week of real work.

The evening hobbyist. A few sessions a week, small projects, mostly Auto. Call it 5–10 credits per evening session, three evenings a week: roughly 60–120 credits a month. Free (50) runs out just as things get interesting; Pro at 1,000 gives you a ceiling you’ll never think about. Start Free, upgrade when you hit the wall.

The full-time developer. Kiro open all day on Auto and Sonnet 5, running specs and reviewing diffs: roughly 30–50 credits a day. Over ~21 working days that’s 630–1,050 credits a month — landing right on Pro’s 1,000 ceiling, which means the good months fit and the busy months spill into overage. Pro+ (2,000) is the comfortable resting place; a month heavy on spec execution can justify Pro Max.

The premium-model user. Same working day, but Opus 5 selected throughout. Multiply everything by 2.2: 66–110 credits a day, 1,400–2,300 a month. That blows past Pro+ in any busy month, so Pro Max (5,000) is the realistic floor. Add parallel agent sessions in Agent Focus mode, or a habit of running GPT-5.6 Sol at 4.4x, and you’re in Power (10,000) territory.

Read those three together and the pattern is clear: hours worked moves your bill linearly, but model choice moves it by more than a factor of two — in either direction.

Four habits that prevent surprise bills

1. Default to Auto; escalate deliberately. Let the router pick. Reach for Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol when you have a genuinely hard problem, and switch back afterwards. Treat “which model is selected right now?” as a question worth asking before a long session.
2. Check usage weekly, not monthly. Multiply your first week by four. If the answer exceeds your plan, you have three weeks to adjust rather than a bill to explain.
3. Watch anything running unattended. Headless CLI runs and CI automation spend credits with nobody at the keyboard, and a retry loop that would annoy you interactively will quietly bill you at 3am. Scope them tightly and cap them. See Kiro CLI Guide for the headless flags.
4. Front-load thinking into specs. Specs cost credits to produce, but a spec that prevents one round of “no, rebuild that differently” pays for itself several times over. Vague prompts are expensive twice: once for the wrong answer, once for the redo.

A caveat about all of these numbers

Pricing changes. Kiro added a whole tier (Pro Max) in June 2026 and gained a second model vendor in July 2026, each of which shifted the arithmetic on this page. The multipliers move as models are released and retired: on 14 September 2026 the whole GPT-5.6 family was re-priced, roughly doubling its multipliers on the same day it gained a larger context window.

kiro.dev/pricing is the authority, always. Everything here was verified against it on the last-reviewed date shown on this page. If the date is more than a couple of months old and you’re about to make a spending decision, check the source first.