Amp
Frontier coding agent with remote orbs you control from laptop, web, or phone.
Evaluation
What to know
Best for
- Engineers who want agents working while offline
- Teams sharing agent threads and portals
- Builders evaluating frontier coding agents beyond chat-in-IDE
Not ideal for
- Developers who only want inline autocomplete
- Air-gapped shops that cannot run remote orbs
- Students needing zero metered compute forever
Key features
- Remote orbs that keep agents running unsupervised
- Control from web, terminal, and phone
- Live portals to preview agent changes
- BYOK / bring-your-own subscription token sources
- Hobby free, Individual ~$20/mo, Teams and Enterprise
Pros
- Agents survive laptop sleep — strong async workflow
- Transparent Hobby to Individual ramp
- BYOK reduces forced token markup anxiety
Cons
- Orb minutes still meter heavy overnight runs
- Newer than mature IDE plugins — ecosystem still evolving
- Enterprise controls only on custom tier
ToolifyNav verdict
Amp is the remote-orb coding-agent lane: keep agents shipping while you are away, review from any device, and bring your own model keys. Cursor and Claude Code own the IDE-native loop; OpenHands owns open-source local/cloud agents; Devin and Factory push ticket-to-PR automation. Amp wins when asynchronous remote execution matters more than staying glued to a local editor — watch orb-minute burn on long refactors. Start on Hobby with a bounded bugfix, then move to Individual once orb-minute economics are clear for your typical overnight runs.
About
About Amp
Amp is a coding agent and development environment that emphasizes remote agents called orbs — isolated machines where agents keep working after you close your laptop. You start threads from web, terminal, or phone, preview changes through portals with live reload, and review diffs without juggling local worktrees. The pitch is frontier-model coding with less environment babysitting.
Pricing on ampcode.com/pricing lists Hobby free with pay-as-you-go orbs or your own runners; Individual about $20/mo with a large orb-minute pool; Teams with no extra workspace fee but members on mixed tiers; Enterprise custom with SCIM, audit logs, spend limits, and pooled credits. Amp markets BYOK and ChatGPT-subscription token sources so you are not forced into a single markup on every token — orb minutes and infra are the metered piece.
Amp competes with Cursor, Claude Code, Devin, OpenHands, and Factory-class coding agents. Its differentiator is the remote orb lifecycle and multi-device control rather than only an IDE plugin. Expect to budget orb minutes carefully on long agent runs; free Hobby is enough to evaluate, Individual is the practical solo floor.
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