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Amp: reviews and analysis
Sourcegraph's agent: fixed plans from $20 a month, or pay-as-you-go with no minimum.
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Our verdict
Amp comes from Sourcegraph, the code search house, and it shows in how it handles context on large repositories. Its pricing mixes two routes: fixed plans from $20 a month, or pay-as-you-go with no minimum for anyone who would rather not commit to a monthly fee. The free plan exists in theory but is closed to new signups as of today. The agent is ambitious and picks models for you, which simplifies or annoys depending on your profile.
Best for: Teams with large repositories preferring consumption over subscriptions.
What changed this week
Sweep of
No substantive change from the previous sweep: what we checked this week confirms what was already there.
- no change
- no change
We have tracked it since July 25, 2026: 3 sweeps on record. We publish the latest change here; the full series is not published.
What the internet says
Amp still has no free tier: the pricing page only lists Megawatt ($20/month), Gigawatt ($200/month) and unlimited pay-as-you-go Unconstrained, and the beta label that used to sit on the subscription block is gone. This week added two verifiable improvements, browser access to orbs without a VPN and a 50% price cut on the most used remote machine tier.
What the web repeats in favour
- Zero markup over the provider's API pricing on pay as you go, with no subscription or commitment and a minimum credit purchase of 5
- Since 18 July there are two fixed-price subscription plans, Megawatt at $20/month and Gigawatt at $200/month, and the vendor makes clear that subscribing is not required
- The four-mode dial publishes which model backs each one and adds a reviewer model that gives a second opinion
- Agents run on remote machines and can be triggered from Slack, webhooks or other agents, on top of the plugins for JetBrains, Neovim, VS Code and Zed
- Since 6 August portals give browser and HTTPS access to services running inside an orb, with no VPN or preview deployments, and can be shared with the team
- On 7 August the most used orb size got 50% cheaper, with a new a1.medium tier at $0.33/hour
What the web repeats against
- The manual states there is no backwards compatibility and no legacy features, and in July the new dial retired the four previous modes, which now have to be reinstalled as plugins
- There is no free tier: the pricing page only lists Megawatt, Gigawatt and unlimited pay-as-you-go Unconstrained, with no $0 plan
- Spend is still not predictable, because once you exceed the plan's included usage you have to add credits or link another provider's subscription
- The $20/month Megawatt plan only gives the low and medium modes, and high and ultra need the $200/month Gigawatt plan with paid credits or your own API key
- On 7 August the orbs' auto-pause on inactivity dropped from 15 to 5 minutes, so a long task that stalls for a moment gets cut off sooner
Sweep sources: Official pricing · Press · Press · Docs · Review sites
Pros / Cons
Pros
- Pay-as-you-go with no monthly minimum, if you prefer it to a fixed fee
- Very good context handling on large repos
- Shared threads for teamwork
Cons
- The free plan is closed to new signups: the real entry price is $20 a month
- Picks models for you, no manual choice
- Per-use cost is hard to predict at first
TLDR: Amp comes from Sourcegraph, the code search house, and it shows in how it handles large repositories. Its economic model runs against the current: no subscription, you pay consumption, with a free tier sustained by discreet advertising. The agent is ambitious and picks models for you, which simplifies or annoys depending on your profile. For teams with monorepos, its context is the argument.
What Amp is and how it works
Sourcegraph spent a decade building code search for the industry’s largest codebases, and Amp is that experience turned into an agent: a terminal and editor tool whose differentiator is understanding enormous repositories, where the problem is not writing code but finding what to touch among millions of lines.
Its two product decisions separate it from the herd. The economic one: no subscription, you pay credits per consumption, with a free tier sustained by discreet in-tool advertising. And the technical one: Amp picks the models for you per task, no selector, on the thesis that the tool knows better which engine suits each step.
It also adds shared threads: agent sessions are visible to the team, turning AI work into something reviewable and learnable between teammates.
What it is like day to day
Large repositories are where it earns its seat: Sourcegraph’s search inheritance translates into an agent that locates the relevant code in bases where others get lost or burn context exploring. For monorepos and projects with years of history, that difference is the product.
The absence of a model selector divides users predictably: for some, one less worry and good results. For others, a black box deciding costs for you. Pay-per-use has the same double edge: no fixed fee to amortize, but a bill that is hard to predict at first until you know your pattern.
Shared threads pay off in teams: watching how a teammate solved a similar task with the agent is free training, and that social layer of AI work is among the product’s most copyable ideas.
Pricing and plans
No subscription: pay-per-use credits, with an advertising-sustained free tier for light use. Real cost depends on your tasks’ volume and complexity, and the practical recommendation is a measured week of use before drawing budget conclusions.
Against the leaders’ $17-20 subscriptions, the math favors Amp on irregular use (you pay only when you work) and evens out or exceeds on intensive daily use.
Who it is for (and who it is not for)
Amp is for teams with large repositories where context is the bottleneck, and for anyone preferring to pay consumption over fixed fees. Shared threads add value in teams wanting to learn agent work together.
It is not for anyone who wants to pick the model at every step, nor for anyone needing predictable monthly cost, which is subscription territory.
Amp alternatives
Claude Code and Codex are the subscription leaders with more general judgment. Cursor gives the IDE-integrated route. For monorepos, Amp competes with a context advantage: for the rest, the choice returns to the usual suspects. They are in Amp alternatives and the ranking in the best AI coding tools.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does pay-per-use work?
You buy credits and each task consumes them according to its complexity and the models Amp decides to use. No monthly fee: quiet months cost little and intense ones show.
Why can I not pick the model?
It is a product decision: Amp assigns the engine per task, on the thesis that automatic selection outperforms manual. If fine model control is non-negotiable for you, this is not your tool.
What does the Sourcegraph inheritance contribute?
Context on large codebases: locating the relevant code in repositories of millions of lines is the problem Sourcegraph has spent a decade solving, and the agent inherits it.
What is the advertising-backed free tier?
A light usage level without paying, financed by discreet advertising inside the tool. Unusual in the category, and enough to evaluate the agent before buying credits.