Reading the article and the linked Github post, as well as the original pricing announcement and the clarification post afterwards, this whole thing seems like some sort of Monty Python sketch. I can't believe that an actual enterprise targeted product comes up with something like:
> "AWS now defines two types of Kiro AI request. Spec requests are those started from tasks, while vibe requests are general chat responses. Executing a sub-task consumes at least one spec request plus a vibe request for "coordination"".
I still don't understand why pricing can't be as simple as it was initially and presented in a clear and understandable way: token cost this much, you used this many tokens, and that is it. Probably because if people would see how much they actually consume for real tasks, they would realize that the "vibes" cost more than an actual developer.
With open-weights models reaching a level where they can sufficiently be used for agentic coding, the price can be directly compared to the price of GPU rentals: https://vast.ai/ has an H100 at $1.65/hr. which can support ~40 concurrent sessions at 40 tok/s. Depending on your agentic workload, you can stretch that any way you like, but let's say it might support 10 active developers at a speed comparable to Claude Code with Sonnet 4 (which I've read is 90 tok/s) who aren't going crazy with sub-agents.
Let's scale that up: $1.65/hr. is ~$1188/mo. (assuming you're renting the GPU 24/7 which you can speculate to not do, which is probably fine as long as there's not scarcity), and divided by ten is ~$119/mo. per user for 10 users.
Add the service layer on top in order to make this a convenient software service, I think $100/mo. is a bargain for unhindered (as far as it goes) access to a high-quality (as far as they come) agentic coding framework.
Feel free to correct my napkin math, it's done very quickly.
> "AWS now defines two types of Kiro AI request. Spec requests are those started from tasks, while vibe requests are general chat responses. Executing a sub-task consumes at least one spec request plus a vibe request for "coordination"".
I still don't understand why pricing can't be as simple as it was initially and presented in a clear and understandable way: token cost this much, you used this many tokens, and that is it. Probably because if people would see how much they actually consume for real tasks, they would realize that the "vibes" cost more than an actual developer.