What to do when Kiro runs out of credits: 9 ways to keep coding in 2026

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product, and it runs Claude Code, Codex and Antigravity, not Kiro. We checked every price and limit below against AWS’s, Anthropic’s, OpenAI’s, Google’s, Cline’s and OpenCode’s own pages on November 13, 2026, and we say where another way is the better pick, including the free ones that don’t need Enjoy.

The ways to keep coding, compared

Kiro, AWS’s agentic IDE, CLI and web app, bills its agent in credits: “a unit of work in response to user prompts,” its FAQ says, spent the same “regardless of which interface the work runs on.” Once your plan credits, trial credits and any add-on credits are gone, “Kiro pauses usage until you purchase more add-on credits or your plan resets at the start of the next billing cycle,” say its add-on credit docs. So you can wait, pay, or move the work to an agent on a different meter.

Way	Cost, checked November 13, 2026	How soon you’re back	Best for
Wait for the reset	Free	The first of next month, at 00:00 UTC	Kiro Free and Kiro Students, or the last days of a month
Buy add-on credits	$0.04 a credit, in packs from $5 (125 credits) to $100	Right away	Finishing the task in front of you, on a paid plan
Upgrade your plan	First upgrade from Free: the rest of the month on Pro free, plus 500 trial credits; later ones prorated	Right away	Running out most months
Ask your admin	Your company’s pool	When your admin raises your limit or buys credits	A team or company seat
Claude Code, in Kiro’s editor	Claude Pro $20 a month, or $17 billed yearly; Max $100; Ultra $200	Right away, in a new conversation	A Claude plan you already pay for
Codex, in Kiro’s editor	ChatGPT Plus $20 a month; Pro $100, $200 or $500	Right away, in a new conversation	A ChatGPT plan you already pay for
Cline or OpenCode, on your own key or free models	Free; your provider’s rates, or nothing for free and local models	Right away, in a new conversation	Paying per token, or not at all
Antigravity	Free, with a weekly quota; Google AI Pro $19.99 a month	Right away, in another editor	A free agent IDE, with Gemini
Enjoy	A monthly subscription, free for 7 days, with your phone and one computer (pricing)	Right away, in a new conversation	Several labs’ agents, so the next limit doesn’t stop the work

Prices are each company’s US list prices, before tax. Kiro’s own agent spends only Kiro’s credits: a request to bring your own API keys and local models has been open on its GitHub since April 2026, so the rows after Kiro’s own are other companies’ agents, on their plans.

First, check what ran out

A limit error isn’t always your credits. Since November 7, Kiro users with credits to spare have reported “You’re sending requests faster than your rate limit allows. Wait a moment before trying again, or run fewer sessions at the same time.” on a first prompt, in the IDE, the CLI and Kiro Web. On November 9, a Kiro maintainer said in the tracking issue that it “points to a service-side problem rather than anything in your setup, and we are investigating it now.” It was still open on November 13. Add-on credits and upgrades won’t help with that one, while the other agents below will.

To see what you have left, per AWS’s own guide and Kiro’s docs:

• In the IDE, look at the status bar at the bottom, or select the profile icon and choose Manage Plan, which opens your billing dashboard in your browser. Its FAQ says the dashboard shows “the number of credits used, and credits remaining.”
• In the CLI, run /usage to “View your current usage statistics and remaining credits,” as Kiro’s command reference puts it.
• In Kiro Web, choose your email address, then Settings, and look under Estimated Usage.

“Credit usage is updated at least every 5 minutes,” so a figure can lag a busy session. And “Using up your plan credits is not the same as using up every credit in your balance,” Kiro’s billing questions say: trial credits from a first upgrade are spent after your plan credits, and “Requests pause only when you have no credits left.”

Here’s what each plan includes, from Kiro’s pricing and its Students announcement:

Plan	Price	Credits a month	Past the limit
Kiro Free	Free	50	Wait, or upgrade: no add-on credits
Kiro Students	Free for a year, for verified students	1,000	Wait: “No overages”
Kiro Pro	$20 a month	1,000	Add-on credits at $0.04
Kiro Pro+	$40 a month	2,000	Add-on credits at $0.04
Kiro Pro Max	$100 a month	5,000	Add-on credits at $0.04
Kiro Power	$200 a month	10,000	Add-on credits at $0.04
Teams, with credit pooling	$20 a seat a month	500 a seat, shared in a pool	Credits your admin buys

Wait for the reset

Best for: Kiro Free and Kiro Students, where there’s nothing to buy, and the last days of any month.

“Kiro bills on a calendar month,” from “12:00 a.m. (UTC) on the first day of the month,” say its billing questions, and plan credits renew then on every plan. In the US, that’s still the last day of the month.

Price: free.

Watch for: “Unused credits do not roll over to the next month,” so a quiet month won’t cover a busy one, and run out on the third and that’s four weeks. On Free, “The Kiro Free tier has fixed monthly limits and doesn’t support add-on credits.” On Students, “If you hit your 1,000 credit limit for the month, you will need to wait until the next cycle,” and when the year ends, “your account will be automatically downgraded to the Kiro free plan.”

Buy add-on credits

Best for: finishing the task in front of you, on Pro, Pro+, Pro Max or Power.

On the usage page of the Kiro portal, select Buy add-on credits, enter how many, select Next, and pay through Stripe. They’re “billed immediately when you purchase them,” so this is a balance you draw down, not a bill after the fact. It spends your plan credits first and add-on credits after, the pack that expires soonest first.

Price: $0.04 a credit, in packs from $5, for 125 credits, to $100. Unused add-on credits “roll over and expire 12 months from the date of purchase,” per Kiro’s pricing.

Watch for: you can hold “Up to 5 add-on credit packs at a time.” Every individual plan’s included credits work out to 2 cents each, so add-on credits cost twice as much, and Kiro’s billing questions say that once “your month-end add-on credit spend starts to approach the price difference to the next tier, moving up will usually lower your total cost.” If you’d rather have a fixed bill, Kiro’s advice is to buy none: “your usage will pause at the cap.”

Upgrade your plan

Best for: running out most months, and anyone on Free who wants back in today.

In the IDE, select the profile icon, then Upgrade Plan for your first upgrade, or Manage Plan and Update subscription after that, per Kiro’s upgrade guide. “Once you upgrade your subscription, it’ll take effect immediately.” Since November 1, 2026, your first upgrade from Free comes with a trial, Kiro’s billing page says: “the rest of that month on Pro is free, and you get 500 trial credits on any paid plan.” Pick Pro+ or above instead, and “you pay only the difference.”

Price: Pro $20 a month, Pro+ $40, Pro Max $100 and Power $200. Fees and credits are prorated “to the second”: Kiro’s own example, a first upgrade to Pro at the start of day 15 of a 30-day month, costs $0 and brings 533 plan credits plus the 500 trial credits.

Watch for: “The free trial applies only to your first upgrade.” After that, “Kiro prorates your fee and credits for the time left in the month,” so an upgrade on the 28th buys only a few days of the bigger plan’s credits. And going back costs more than going up: “If you downgrade from a higher tier to a lower tier mid-month, you are charged the full fee for the current month.”

Ask your admin

Best for: a seat on a team or company subscription, where the credits aren’t yours to buy.

On a team, “All seat holders in a pool share the available credits,” and “Credit pooling doesn’t use overages,” per Kiro’s pricing. When you reach the limit your admin set, “Kiro blocks further usage until you adjust their limit or until usage resets at the start of the next billing cycle,” say Kiro’s usage limit docs. An admin can raise it with Set usage limit, or buy more for the pool under Access management, Credit sharing, Buy more credits, and “Additional credits are available for 12 months from purchase.”

Price: nothing to you, if it’s approved.

Watch for: some companies pay for overages instead of pooling. “If your team signs in to Kiro with AWS Identity Center or an external identity provider,” Kiro’s blog says, the cap on them is set in the AWS Service Quotas console, where an administrator can request a higher one. And check before you bring another agent to company code: the agents below send your code to Anthropic, OpenAI or the provider you pick, under their terms rather than AWS’s.

Claude Code, in Kiro’s editor

Best for: a Claude plan you already pay for, without leaving Kiro.

You don’t need another editor. Anthropic’s extension docs say it “also installs in forks like Devin Desktop or Kiro. Search for ‘Claude Code’ in the editor’s Extensions view, or install from the Open VSX Registry,” and “any paid Claude subscription (Pro, Max, Ultra, Team, or Enterprise) or a Claude Console account works, and no API key is required.” It draws on Anthropic’s limits, not your credits. Your project’s briefing can come too: Kiro picks up an AGENTS.md in the workspace root, which it says is “always included,” and Claude Code reads it “only when you have no CLAUDE.md” in your project. Kiro’s specs are files in .kiro/specs/, “designed to be version-controlled,” so you can ask Claude Code to work through a spec’s tasks.md.

Price: Claude’s pricing has Pro at $20 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly ($200 up front), Max at $100 and Ultra at $200. The free plan leaves Claude Code out.

Watch for: “Pro and Max plans have a five-hour session limit and a weekly limit,” says Anthropic’s help center, and “These limits are shared across Claude and Claude Code.” Our Claude Code usage limit guide covers what to do then. “Some features are only available in the CLI.” Check that the publisher is Anthropic: “Extension marketplaces are third-party software, which Anthropic doesn’t endorse, maintain, or audit,” it says, and it publishes to Microsoft’s marketplace and Open VSX. You start a new conversation in Claude Code, so tell it where the work stands.

Codex, in Kiro’s editor

Best for: a ChatGPT plan you already pay for, and OpenAI’s newest models on it.

OpenAI’s IDE docs say “VS Code and compatible editors use the Codex extension,” and name VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf, not Kiro. OpenAI does publish the extension, “Codex – OpenAI’s coding agent,” on Open VSX, the registry Kiro installs plugins from. Sign in with ChatGPT “for subscription access,” and it draws on your plan, not Kiro’s credits. “Codex reads AGENTS.md files before doing any work,” OpenAI says, so the same file briefs Kiro and Codex.

Price: Codex’s pricing puts the IDE extension on ChatGPT Plus, at $20 a month, and Pro, at $100, $200 or $500. Free and Go get “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout,” not the extension.

Watch for: OpenAI estimates 15 to 160 local messages every five hours with GPT-6.1 Sol on Plus, and says “These estimates are not fixed message limits” and “Weekly limits may also apply.” From December, “Plus, Pro, and Business plans’ usage allowance will be shared across ChatGPT and Codex,” per its help center. Our Codex usage limit guide covers running out there. And Kiro isn’t among the editors OpenAI documents, so OpenAI hasn’t said the extension works there.

Cline or OpenCode, on your own key or free models

Best for: paying a provider per token, or nothing at all, for routine work.

Since Kiro won’t take your own key, these agents do. Cline is “an AI coding agent that lives in your editor and your terminal,” and “Cline is free for individual developers,” per its pricing. Connect “your own provider credentials for cloud providers or local runtimes,” or use Cline’s own billing. Its docs name VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, JetBrains, Antigravity and Zed, not Kiro, but it’s on Open VSX. OpenCode is “an open source coding agent” for your terminal, desktop or phone, under the MIT license, and “OpenCode comes with a set of free models. No account needed.” It also connects “200+ LLM providers through Models.dev, including local models,” and our local model guide covers running one.

Price: both are free. You pay your provider’s rates, nothing for free or local models, or a flat fee if you want one: ClinePass is “Flat $9.99/month” for popular open coding models, and OpenCode Go starts at $10 a month.

Watch for: OpenCode’s free models are free “for a limited time,” and for some, “collected data may be used to improve the model” during that time. A local model is only as good as your computer’s memory allows. And your own key bills by the token, with no monthly cap unless your provider sets one.

Antigravity, free

Best for: a free agent IDE, with Gemini.

Google’s Antigravity is free to download for macOS 13 and later, Windows 10 and later, Linux and Googlebook, per its download page. Without a plan, you get “A meaningful quota, refreshed weekly,” per its plans page, with Gemini 4 Hydrogen and Gemini 3.8 Flash, and Google AI Pro adds “A high, generous quota, refreshed every five hours until the weekly limit is reached.”

Price: free. Google AI Pro is $19.99 a month, and Ultra starts at $99.99.

Watch for: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6, which free accounts have now, are marked “Will be removed on November 18, 2026” on its models page, as our memo explains, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 come with paid Google AI Pro, “for non-trial subscriptions only.” It’s a different editor from Kiro, so you leave Kiro’s specs and hooks behind, and the weekly quota can run out too: our Antigravity quota guide covers that.

Enjoy

Best for: several labs’ agents in one place, so when one runs out, another carries on.

Enjoy runs Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, and local models through OpenCode, on Mac, Windows and Linux, on the plans you already have. It doesn’t run Kiro’s agent, so it won’t refill your credits; it’s for moving the work to plans with limits of their own. Your Kiro specs and AGENTS.md are files in your project, so any of these agents can read them. What it adds:

• Another agent, mid-conversation. Hand a job from Claude Code to Codex or Antigravity: “The new agent gets the conversation so far, including replies from other agents, before it works on your message.”
• Limits handled. When an agent runs out, Enjoy switches to another of your accounts with usage left, or waits for the reset and carries on.
• Usage in view. It shows what each signed-in account has left and when it resets, for the agents that report it.

Price: Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and one computer; each other computer is $9.99 a month, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing. The agents are billed separately: Claude Code needs a paid Claude plan and Codex in Enjoy needs ChatGPT Plus or above, while Antigravity works with a free Google account and OpenCode with free or local models.

Watch for: Enjoy isn’t an IDE like Kiro. It has no specs or hooks built in, and it can’t import your Kiro chats, so you start a new conversation. Waiting out a limit needs “Your computer must be on, with Enjoy open, when the usage resets,” and scheduled workflows also run only while it’s awake with Enjoy open. Enjoy isn’t open source, and it’s a monthly subscription on top of your AI plans once the free week ends. If you only want Claude or GPT beside Kiro, the two extensions above don’t need Enjoy at all.

Why your credits ran out so fast

“Credits are consumed fractionally based on each request,” Kiro’s billing page says, and “Simple edits and shorter prompts will use fewer credits than complex, lengthy tasks.” Agent work counts wherever it runs: its FAQ says “spec refinement, task execution, and agent hook execution, will consume credits.” To make next month last:

• Watch the model. “Cost is relative to Auto (1.0x baseline),” says Kiro’s models page: “a task that costs 10 credits on Auto would cost 20 credits on Opus 5.5,” and GPT-5.6 Sol is 4.4 times Auto. At the other end, Claude Haiku 5.5 is 0.06 times for requests up to 100K tokens and Qwen3 Coder Next 0.05 times. Kiro’s advice is “Start with Auto for most work.”
• Mind long requests. GPT-5.6 requests over 272K tokens “are billed at double that rate,” and Haiku 5.5 and Grok 4.7 cost more past their own thresholds.
• Prune your hooks. Agent hooks spend credits each time they run, so turn off the ones you don’t need.
• Get warned early. “When you reach 80% of your monthly credit usage, Kiro sends a low resource notification,” per its notification docs. In the CLI, /settings display can show your remaining credits in the status line.

When to stay on Kiro and wait

If the first of the month is a few days off, waiting is free, and a small add-on pack bridges the gap on a paid plan. If you’re on Free and want back in now, your first upgrade to Pro costs nothing for the rest of the month, and its first bill comes on the first of the next. Upgrade for good when add-on credits start costing you the difference to the next plan most months.

And stay in Kiro, whichever agent you add, if specs and hooks are what you’d miss. Claude Code and Codex install in its editor, so a Claude or ChatGPT plan can take the heavy tasks while Kiro’s credits go on specs. If the rate-limit error is what stopped you, the fix is Kiro’s to make: an agent on another plan keeps you working until it does. Leave only when Kiro’s credits are what stop you every month and its specs aren’t what you use: our Kiro alternatives guide compares where to go, and Kiro vs Claude Code weighs the two meters.

How we compared

We read Kiro’s pricing, billing, add-on credit, billing questions, upgrade, subscription, notification, models, steering, specs, downloads, CLI and team pages, its FAQ, its blog and AWS’s re:Post guide; Anthropic’s pricing, help center and Claude Code docs; OpenAI’s pricing, sign-in, extension and help pages; Cline’s and OpenCode’s pages; and Google’s Antigravity and Google AI plan pages, all on November 13, 2026, and every one is linked below. The rate-limit reports and the request for your own keys are on Kiro’s own GitHub. We quote each company’s own words for its limits, and we leave out what it hasn’t documented, such as how many tasks 1,000 credits buy. Plans and limits change often, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.