I’m agent-agnostic, in which I don’t use only one. I keep changing from time to time. My earliest forays into agentic programing were with Claude Code, which was then and still is probably the gold standard. But since then I’ve tried quite a few: Codex CLI (good models, barebones agent), Droid (not a fan), OpenCode (big fan!), and Amp.

I’ve been using Amp for a while, but only from time to time to see its evolution. With the move to Opus 4.5, I found that Amp has become very capable and I started using it more and more until it became my go-to agent.

The one downside of Amp is that it can get expensive. Since it’s not tied to any of the labs, it needs to charge API pricing, which can get expensive if you use it a lot, though maybe less than most people think.

But it’s undeniable that there is a psychological impact at seeing money constantly being drawn as you use, even if at the end of the day you’d spend the same as with a subscription.

These are challenges the Amp people have been working on for a while. Then not that long ago, they came up with a first attempt: an ad-supported free tier. You could use Amp up to $10 worth of API per day as long as you agreed to see ads on your agent.

To be clear, ads are optional. You only see the ads if you choose to and if you do, you get $10 worth of inference per day, using some cheaper models. This is how the ads appear:

Personally, I find them unobstructive, but opinions may vary. Now, you may notice that I emphasized the fact that these ads are options. The reason why I did so is that it appears that the idea of ads hits a nerve in some people. Ever since their free tier came out, I’ve seen several tweets of people announcing their refusal to ever try Amp because they don’t want ads.

Now Amp came up with a next step, whereas paying customers can also enable Amp Free and get those $10 a day of inference and their balance will only be drawn from once they exhaust their free allowance. That’s the equivalent of $300 a month of free inference. Not only that, but you can use that free allowance with Opus 4.5.

I understand the aversion to ads. I share it. But $300/month is an incredible value to ignore. So I decided to enabled Amp Free and use Amp exclusively this month to see how much I will have spent by the end of the month. My suspicion is that I’ll spend less than my Claude Max subscription.

But something that I think is very important to remember is that there’s a whole world of engineers outside of the developed world. For a developer in, say, South America, the cost of a Claude or Codex subscription is prohibitive. This is keeping a whole world of engineers out of the LLM revolution. Amp’s approach offers a way for them to have access to premium models they otherwise wouldn’t have access to.