Vendor cost breakdown
Amazon Q Developer cost in 2026 — and the seats nobody uses
Amazon Q Developer — AWS’s AI coding assistant and the successor to CodeWhisperer — has a perpetual Free tier and a Pro tier at $19 per user per month, billed through your AWS account. Pro is a flat per-assigned-seat charge, not usage-based, so a subscribed developer who never opens the IDE or CLI still bills $19 every month and never auto-downgrades to Free. DevSpend reconciles assigned Pro subscriptions against IDE/CLI activity and your AWS bill to surface the seats you can drop.
Prices verified against official vendor pages on Jun 27, 2026. All waste figures are estimates from your own inputs.
Example reconciliation
A typical setup
Billing
What you pay
$570/mo
Entitlements
Seats you bought
30 seats
Activity
Who is active
20 active
Recoverable waste
Inactive paid seats
$190/mo
Estimated from a typical setup — edit it below.
Amazon Q Developer plans and per-seat prices
VENDOR| Plan | Price / seat / month | Best for | Usage notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free | Individual developers (Builder ID or IAM) | Perpetual free tier with monthly limits: 50 agentic requests/month, latest Claude models, IDE/CLI use, reference tracking, and 1,000 lines/month of code transformation. No enterprise admin controls or IP indemnity. |
| Pro tier | $19Monthly only ($19/user/month) billed through AWS; pro-rated the first month. No discounted annual plan is published. | Teams and enterprises | Higher agentic-request limits, IAM Identity Center admin controls, codebase customization, and IP indemnity. Includes 4,000 lines/month of code transformation pooled at the AWS payer-account level; additional lines bill at $0.003 each. |
Where teams waste money on Amazon Q Developer
TELEMETRYFINANCE- Pro is a flat $19/user/month billed per assigned subscription, not per active user. A developer subscribed in IAM Identity Center who never opens the IDE or CLI still bills the full $19 — there is no usage-based fallback that drops idle seats to Free.
- Pro subscriptions must be unassigned manually in IAM Identity Center / the Amazon Q Developer console. An offboarded employee whose identity is not removed keeps an active $19/month subscription until an admin revokes it; there is no automatic deactivation on inactivity.
- Many developers only use code suggestions, chat, and the 50 free agentic requests — all covered by the perpetual Free tier at $0. Putting every developer on Pro by default pays $19/month for users who never exceed Free-tier limits or need IP indemnity and customization.
- Pro’s 4,000-lines/month transformation allowance is pooled at the AWS payer-account level, and overage bills at $0.003 per line on top of seat fees. Heavy users draw down the shared pool while light users still pay full price, masking which seats are actually justified.
- Billing is per AWS account/payer, so a developer working across linked accounts or a fragmented AWS Organizations setup can accumulate duplicate Pro subscriptions; teams also running Kiro or Amazon Q Business can pay for overlapping AI-assistant seats for the same person.
How to find unused Amazon Q Developer seats
VENDORTELEMETRY- In IAM Identity Center (or the Amazon Q Developer console), export the list of assigned Pro subscriptions.
- Compare each subscription against IDE/CLI activity — a $19/month Pro seat never auto-downgrades to Free on inactivity.
- Unassign developers with no recent activity, and any former employees whose identities weren’t removed.
- Confirm light users need Pro at all — the perpetual Free tier covers code suggestions, chat, and 50 agentic requests/month.
Estimate your Amazon Q Developer spend
The calculator below is prefilled with a typical Amazon Q Developer setup — for example, this one runs $570/month with an estimated $190/month lost to inactive seats. Swap in your own seats and prices — nothing is saved until you create a free workspace.
Tool inputs
Seats, price, active estimate, and usage/API spend. Nothing is saved yet.
Active is your best estimate of seats in real use — the gap to assigned seats is your recoverable waste. Active can’t exceed seats, so it’s capped automatically.
Amazon Q Developer cost FAQ
How much does Amazon Q Developer cost per user per month?
The Pro tier is $19 per user per month, billed through your AWS account. There is also a perpetual Free tier at $0. AWS publishes only a monthly price — there is no separate discounted annual plan, and the first month is pro-rated.
Is there a free version of Amazon Q Developer?
Yes. The perpetual Free tier includes 50 agentic requests/month, the latest Claude models, IDE or CLI use, reference tracking, and 1,000 lines/month of code transformation. It lacks enterprise admin controls, higher limits, codebase customization, and IP indemnity.
Are there usage charges on top of the $19 seat fee?
Yes, for code transformation. Pro includes 4,000 lines/month per user, pooled at the AWS payer-account level (e.g. 100 subscriptions allow 400,000 lines/month before overage). Additional lines are billed at $0.003 each. Pro raises agentic-request limits, but AWS does not publish a pay-as-you-go overage rate for agentic requests.
How do I find unused Amazon Q Developer seats?
Reconcile assigned Pro subscriptions in IAM Identity Center / the Amazon Q Developer console against actual IDE/CLI activity and your AWS bill. Any subscribed user with no recent activity, or a former employee who was not unassigned, is a $19/month idle seat — and because seats are flat-fee per assignment, idle seats never auto-downgrade to Free.
More vendor cost breakdowns
Or track every tool in one free workspace — up to 5 subscriptions, waste number always visible. Need unlimited tracking or a print-ready reclaim report? See Pro — $39/mo.