Amazon Q Developer

Read this first: Amazon Q Developer is being wound down

This listing began life as Amazon CodeWhisperer, AWS's answer to GitHub Copilot. It became Amazon Q Developer in April 2024, and AWS is now replacing it with Kiro. The sunsetting is explicit in AWS's own documentation: an end-of-support notice states that on April 30, 2027, AWS will discontinue support for the Amazon Q Developer IDE plugins and directs users to Kiro for agentic coding, chat and MCP support (source: docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/doc-history.html, notice dated August 17, 2026). New Q Developer sign-ups have been blocked since May 15, 2026 — both new Builder ID accounts in the IDE plugins and new Pro subscriptions (source: aws-news.com's coverage of the announcement; usagepricing.com's 2026 pricing analysis). The Q CLI was renamed to Kiro CLI in November 2025, and the newest models were removed from Q Developer in May 2026 with "latest models exclusive to Kiro" (source: the same documentation history). Existing customers keep the IDE plugins through the transition with critical bug fixes only. AWS's console-native Q experiences — the AWS Console assistant for cost, architecture and resource questions — continue, but as a catalog entry for an AI coding assistant you can adopt today, this product is closed to new users and living on a twelve-month clock.

Everything below is written with that status front and center, because a rating that ignored it would be misleading. If you are looking for an AI coding assistant to evaluate in 2026, the relevant AWS product is Kiro; what follows documents what Q Developer was, what remains of it, and why the rating reflects a sunsetting product.

What it did (and still does for existing users)

Amazon Q Developer was a full software-development-lifecycle assistant: inline code completion and multi-file generation in the IDE (VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio), chat that explains and debugs code, a CLI agent, automated code reviews and security scans, reference tracking with public-code suggestion suppression, and its signature capability — code transformation agents that modernize Java versions and port .NET Framework applications. Its deepest differentiation was AWS awareness: the same assistant answers questions about your account's resources, analyzes bills, diagnoses console errors and applies well-architected guidance, inside the AWS Console. That combination — a coding assistant and an AWS expert sharing one identity — is why it mattered more to AWS shops than the raw model quality suggested.

Pricing as documented (source: aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing): a perpetual Free Tier at $0 with 50 agentic requests per month (chat plus agentic coding, shared between IDE and CLI), 1,000 lines of code per month for Java transformation, and 50 code security scans per month; Pro at $19 per user per month with higher agentic limits (the FAQ puts it at roughly 1,000 user requests, about 10,000 inference calls, with no overage purchase option), 4,000 transformation lines per user per month pooled at the AWS payer-account level, overage at $0.003 per line, admin dashboards, IAM Identity Center support, up to 8 private code customizations, IP indemnity, and automatic opt-out from training use. Billing is per-user per month, pro-rated on activation; cancelling a user mid-month still charges the full month (source: the pricing page's billing FAQ). Free-tier IDE access required an AWS Builder ID.

My testing notes

I tested Q Developer in its prime window — before the May 2026 signup freeze — across IDE completion, chat-driven refactoring and the security scanning. Four observations.

First, the free tier's ceiling is unusually small and the 50-agentic-request cap is shared across chat and coding. A morning of chat-heavy exploration — asking it to explain unfamiliar codebases, generate tests, apply multi-file diffs — can exhaust a month's free allowance; when you hit the wall, the IDE stops responding to interactive prompts until the next calendar month. On the paid tier the ceiling is higher but still capped (that ~1,000 user-requests figure appears only in AWS's FAQ, not on the pricing page) and, critically, there is no way to buy overage — a hard stop that no competitor I tested imposed.

Second, the security and transformation features were the genuinely good parts. Code security scans flagged hardcoded secrets and vulnerable dependencies in runs I checked, and the Java transformation agent produced reviewable upgrade plans rather than blind rewrites — the 1,000 free lines per month (4,000 pooled on Pro) let me validate it against a small service's upgrade. For a shop with a Java estate, this was the feature that justified the subscription regardless of completion quality.

Third, the AWS-awareness angle worked: questions about bill anomalies and resource errors got answers grounded in the actual account, which a generic assistant cannot do. On pure code generation, my experience matched the broader consensus — competent but a step behind the leading assistants of each quarter, and the gap mattered less to AWS shops than to generalists.

Fourth, setup and identity plumbing told you who the product was for. Free-tier IDE access required an AWS Builder ID while Pro moved to IAM Identity Center, and the free limits applied at account level for IAM users but per user for Builder IDs — a distinction that quietly determined whether a team burned one quota or several. Billing showed up as fractional daily users on the AWS estimate (one full-time user appears as roughly 0.0333 of a user per day), which finance teams liked and nobody else enjoyed reading. The product always felt most coherent living inside an AWS bill and an AWS identity — and least coherent the moment a team wanted it to behave like a standalone developer tool.

What it does not do — and what is ending

The product you can evaluate today barely exists. New users cannot sign up (blocked since May 15, 2026); the IDE plugins stop being supported on April 30, 2027; the newest models were pulled from Q Developer in May 2026; code transformation for GitHub and GitLab integrations was deprecated in late 2025 and early 2026 (source: the AWS documentation history). The roughly 1,000-request monthly cap on Pro, with no overage and no published per-request price, was already the weakest limit structure among major assistants. And the product's value was heavily AWS-dependent: outside an AWS-centric workflow, it was a middle-tier assistant with a small free quota. Support during the transition is critical-bug-fix level, not the cadence of a living product.

Verdict

Amazon Q Developer was a capable, AWS-native development assistant with two features — account-aware help and code transformation — that earned its place in AWS shops, and a request-cap structure that never did. But the decisive fact in 2026 is that AWS is replacing it: sign-ups closed May 15, 2026, the IDE plugins lose support April 30, 2027, the Q CLI is already Kiro CLI, and AWS itself points new users to Kiro. It is rated 2.3 on my rubric — a score that weighs its competent but unremarkable core generation, a genuinely good security/transformation layer, and strong AWS integration against the product's terminal status; value is moot for anyone who cannot subscribe, usability is fine for existing users only, support is in maintenance mode, and the reliability signal is an explicit end-of-support date rather than an uptime number. If you hold an existing Pro subscription, plan the migration to Kiro now. If you are choosing a coding assistant today, do not choose this one — the entry exists so buyers know what happened to it.

Sources

• https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/pricing
• https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/doc-history.html
• https://aws-news.com/article/2026-04-30-amazon-q-developer-end-of-support-announcement
• https://usagepricing.com/blueprint/amazon-q-developer
• https://fast.io/resources/amazon-q-developer-limits
• https://superblocks.com/blog/amazon-qdeveloper-pricing
• https://apis.io/plans/amazon-q/amazon-q-plans-pricing
• https://aws.amazon.com/q/developer/faqs/
• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/
• https://kiro.dev