Amp is an agentic coding tool that lets developers run AI coding agents directly from the terminal, VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, Zed, or the web, with agents able to keep working unsupervised on remote machines even after a laptop is closed. It was created inside Sourcegraph and, since December 2, 2025, has been developed by the independent company Amp, spun out as "Amp Frontier Corporation" and co-founded by 20 former Sourcegraph team members including CEO Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu.
Who builds it
- Originally built as a Sourcegraph product; Sourcegraph is the code-search and code-intelligence company founded in 2013.
- On December 2, 2025, Amp and Sourcegraph split into two independent companies; Amp said its own traction drove the spin-out: "Amp's traction spun us out of Sourcegraph. Amp is profitable."
- The new company was co-founded by 20 people from the Amp team, led by Quinn Slack (CEO) and Beyang Liu, both Sourcegraph co-founders.
- Sourcegraph and Amp remain linked through shared board investors (including Craft, Redpoint, Sequoia and a16z), but operate as separate businesses with separate leadership.
Core features
- Works as a CLI, a VS Code/VS Code-fork extension (Cursor, Windsurf), a JetBrains plugin (2025.1+), a Neovim plugin, in Zed, and on the web.
- "Orbs": remote agent environments that keep executing tasks even when your local machine is offline, checkable from your phone.
- Four selectable intensity modes — low, medium, high and ultra — to trade off speed against depth of reasoning.
- An "oracle" feature that requests a second opinion from another frontier model when the primary model is stuck on a hard problem.
- A plugin system for hooking into agent events, adding custom tools, and enforcing team policies.
- Thread sharing and leaderboards so teams can reuse successful agent runs and monitor adoption.
Pricing
- Amp Free — an ad-supported tier with credits that refresh hourly, worth roughly $10/day (about $300/month); ads can be switched off, in which case usage is billed at standard rates. Amp calls this "an experiment" it can't promise to run forever.
- Pay-as-you-go — no subscription; a $5 minimum credit purchase; Amp charges "zero markup" on the underlying model providers' API pricing for individuals and non-enterprise teams; unused credits expire after a year of inactivity and are pooled across a workspace.
- Enterprise — usage is priced roughly 50% above individual/team rates, with a $1,000 minimum purchase; enterprise customers get zero data retention for LLM text inputs and can enforce MCP-server allowlists and other policies centrally.
Who it's for
Amp suits developers who want a model-agnostic, unopinionated agent that plugs into an editor or terminal they already use rather than a brand-new IDE, and teams that want shared, auditable agent threads instead of ad hoc individual usage. Because pricing tracks raw model cost rather than a flat subscription, it also appeals to users who want to avoid paying for unused capacity.