Is there any way for another AI coding tool to worm its way into the hearts of startup founders — and past Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini Code Assist, GitHub Copilot, the many other AI-wrapped VSCode forks, and vibe-coding phenoms like Replit and Lovable?

Amazon wants to try using the tried-and-true method of giving its tool away for free.

The cloud giant says it will grant qualified early-stage startups a free year of credits to its competitor, Kiro Pro+, AWS CEO Matt Garman announced during his keynote speech at the re:Invent 2025 conference. These startups can request free credits for up to 100 users.

But there are restrictions. Only startups that have secured VC funding ranging from pre-seed to Series B funding are eligible. U.S.-based startups are eligible, but the offer is not available in every country. Geographic restrictions include France, Germany, and Italy, much of South America, and, naturally, trade-sanctioned countries. In addition, applications must be received by December 31.

Check out the latest reveals on everything from agentic AI and cloud infrastructure to security and much more from the flagship Amazon Web Services event in Las Vegas. This video is brought to you in partnership with AWS.