Amp has a new mode: free. It's free of charge and supported by ads.
(Update: You can use Amp Free at work! Amp Free no longer requires you to share your data for training. We changed this one week after launch because ads alone cover our costs.)
Like our default mode in Amp (which is now called smart), Amp Free is a unique combination of system prompt, tools, and a selection of top OSS and frontier models.
Models have changed tremendously in the last six months. Many are now great at being agents, and they’re cheaper too. All this means Amp Free is now possible—plenty of good tokens at a discount, a coding agent that knows how to use them, and the Internet’s best business model: advertisements.
In turn, we’re now going to make agentic programming accessible to everyone and start exploring what’s possible when good tokens become cheap.
Try it: sign in & install Amp, then use /mode free in the Amp CLI, or select free in the prompt field in the Amp editor extension.
Ads
Amp Free is funded by ads from dev and infra companies we all love, including Axiom, Baseten, Buildkite, Chainguard, Chroma, Graphite, Parallel, PlanetScale, Prisma, Roboflow, Tailwind Labs, turbopuffer, and WorkOS.
The ads are targeted based on your codebase, and you can even ask Amp to help you try the advertiser’s product in your codebase or application. Ads are shown separately and never influence Amp’s responses.
Thank you to our launch advertisers who are making this all possible!
Which models?
It’s a mix of top OSS models, frontier models with limited context windows, and pre-release frontier models in testing. Model providers sometimes will ask us to obfuscate the name of the model being used, and we can’t guarantee that free mode will use any particular model because we need to source good discounted tokens from various providers' surplus capacity.
No training required
Update (2025-10-22): Amp Free no longer requires you to opt into sharing your data for training. We changed this one week after launch because ads alone cover our costs. We have switched training mode off for any users who had previously enabled it to use Amp Free.
Why make Amp Free?
We wanted to make Amp less expensive without compromising the smart mode. In the last few months we’ve seen new models, fast models, cheap models, more model providers, and aggressive datacenter construction. We thought a lot, we laughed nervously, we ran some numbers, and we realized the Internet’s oldest business model could help here: advertisements.
If we keep the ads tasteful, if we keep the quality up, and if we keep our partnerships strong, then we can bring agentic coding to more programmers and follow the frontier to new places together, which is why we started Amp in the first place.
Why go all the way to free, not just cheaper?
We need to be able to iterate quickly on Amp to keep it good. We can do that when customers are willing to pay for unconstrained frontier model use (in Amp’s paid smart mode), or when it’s free and we have flexibility to experiment.
Who would want ads?
We're betting that millions of devs will prefer ads to paying $20-$200+/month. We’ll see.
Why us?
We're in the fortunate position of being able to aggregate excess supply across all providers.
Some limits apply
For interactive use in your editor or on the CLI. There are some rate limits. We may need to limit Amp Free signups to manage scale; if so, we'll prioritize existing Amp users and anyone with paid usage before new users.
Happy free coding!
To get started, sign in & install Amp, use /mode free in the Amp CLI, or select free in the prompt field in the Amp editor extension.
Contact us if you want to advertise to devs on Amp Free or provide inference, or if you have a dev product and want to provide free AI features by showing ads.