If you are looking for Amp Code alternatives, pick by what is pushing you out rather than by feature count — and check first whether your reason is a setting inside Amp rather than a reason to change client at all. Amp here means the coding agent at ampcode.com, operated by Amp Frontier Corporation. It is active and shipping, so leaving is a preference, not a rescue.
One disambiguation, because this name collides badly: AMP is also Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages framework, AMP Limited on the ASX, the Flexa AMP token and Amazon's live-radio app, which shut down in 2023 — and none of those is this. Nor is this a Sourcegraph product any more — Amp announced its spin-out on December 2, 2025, its About page opens "We are an independent agent research lab", and its Terms of Service name Amp Frontier Corporation. Sourcegraph's prices and docs do not describe this product.
Start with why you are leaving
Four of the five reasons below have a first-party fix or a first-party admission behind them. Work down the middle column before the right one.
| Why you want out | Try this inside Amp first | If you still want out |
|---|---|---|
| You want your own gateway, on a free account | A single-provider key (Amp names Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI) or a ChatGPT / X Premium+ subscription is ungated and works on Hobby today | Claude Code, opencode or Cline — none of the three documents a plan gate on a custom base URL |
| You do not want your key held server-side | Nothing. Amp's published CLI configuration has no base-URL or API-key setting at all; the credential lives in your Amp account | The same three: each reads the key from configuration you control — an environment variable, opencode.json, or Cline's own provider settings |
| Orb minutes are the bill | Runners run Amp agents on your own computers for free, and "One Runner Is Now Enough" (September 17, 2026) made one runner serve several directories | OpenHands, or Factory Droid, whose Droid Computers come with the $100 Plus tier |
| You need procurement stability | Zero and minimal data retention was extended to all users and workspaces on September 13, 2026, and the Teams tier is "No extra charge" and lists "SAML/OIDC SSO" | goose, under the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation since April 7, 2026, or the MIT-licensed OpenHands and opencode |
| You want an IDE, not a terminal | Amp's own editor surfaces were not surveyed for this guide, so check them before you move | Cline (Apache-2.0) or Kilo Code (MIT, BYOK on the free tier, now at kilo.ai) |
On the fourth row, Amp says it about itself better than a comparison page can: "If you're looking for a product that will stay the same and check every procurement box, this isn't it." That is a vendor self-description on its own About page, not a defect report — but if it describes the thing your organisation cannot accept, no feature table will change it.
The gate that sends most people here
This is the boundary the whole decision turns on, and it is narrower than either "Amp supports BYOK" or "Amp blocks BYOK".
| Connection kind | Which tiers, as of September 21, 2026 | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| API key for a single provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI) | Every tier, Hobby included | "Usage bills to your account with that provider" |
| Consumer subscription (ChatGPT, 𝕏 Premium+/SuperGrok) | Every tier, Hobby included | Counts against that plan's own limits |
| Routers, gateways and Custom URL endpoints | Megawatt, Gigawatt and Enterprise only, behind an experimental feature flag | A paid tier from $20 per month before the first token |
Quoted from Amp's Model Routing documentation, read September 21, 2026: routers and gateways "are experimental and in early access for Megawatt, Gigawatt, and Enterprise customers only. We will roll them out to everyone soon." Custom URL sits inside that bullet. No general-availability date is published anywhere, and Amp's news index has shipped nothing since Free Agent on September 13, 2026 that lifts it — so read this as a dated state, not a forecast, and re-check it before you act. Amp's two first-party sources also differ slightly on scope: the September 13 post says "Megawatt and Gigawatt members", while the newer Model Routing doc names three tiers. Prefer the doc; confirm in your own account settings.
Two consequences people discover late. First, adding a connection never by itself ends Amp billing: "Anything no connection serves is served by Amp", so a model mapping that misses an ID quietly keeps charging Amp credits. Second, there is no local escape hatch — Amp's published CLI configuration reference lists every amp. setting and contains no base-URL key, no API-key key and no environment variable for either.
What the alternatives actually let you configure
| Client | Where a third-party endpoint goes | What the client costs | What you give up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL plus ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, no plan gate stated | No charge for setting an endpoint; you pay whoever owns the key | MCP tool search is disabled by default on a non-first-party host, and as of v2.1.196 Remote Control is disabled when the base URL is not api.anthropic.com |
| opencode | opencode.json, provider.<id>.options.baseURL and .apiKey | Free, MIT | Repository now lives at anomalyco/opencode; latest release v1.18.31 (September 14, 2026) |
| Codex CLI | ~/.codex/config.toml, base_url plus env_key | Free, Apache-2.0 | wire_api — "responses is the only supported value", so an endpoint that speaks only Chat Completions cannot be used |
| Cline | Base URL, API key and model ID under API Provider → OpenAI Compatible | Published plans are Open Source — Free and Enterprise — Custom | Inference credits are optional and usage-based, so budget the provider separately |
| Kilo Code | BYOK listed as Individual on the free tier; shared BYOK is the Teams feature | Free & Open Source $0; Teams $15/user/month; Enterprise custom | Domain moved from kilocode.ai to kilo.ai, so old bookmarks redirect |
| OpenHands | "Bring your own key or use our providers at-cost", listed on every tier | Open Source (Local) free and MIT; Individual (SaaS) free; Enterprise custom | The free SaaS tier caps you at 10 conversations per day; self-hosted pricing is not published |
| goose | BYOK, model-agnostic | Free, Apache-2.0 | Repository and docs moved with the donation to the Agentic AI Foundation; v1.51.0 (September 17, 2026) |
| Crush | Not compared here | Not priced here — free to download from its repository | Licensed FSL-1.1-MIT — source-available, not an OSI open-source licence, and GitHub reports NOASSERTION |
| Factory Droid | Not compared here | Pro $20/mo; Plus $100/mo; Max $200/mo; Teams $60/mo per team plus $40/mo per seat | Droid Computers, the structural analogue of Amp's orbs, start at the $100 Plus tier; factory.ai now redirects to factory.com |
Sources, all checked September 21, 2026: Claude Code environment variables, opencode providers, Codex CLI config reference, Cline pricing and its OpenAI Compatible provider page, Kilo Code pricing, OpenHands pricing, goose's AAIF announcement, Crush's licence and Factory pricing. Two names that still circulate as alternatives are not options: Continue's own page now reads "Continue has joined Cursor", and Roo Code's repository is archived with a final push of May 15, 2026. Aider is neither archived nor retired but was last pushed May 22, 2026 — slowing rather than dead, and covered in Aider alternatives.
Kunavo serves no embedding model, so a client that indexes your repository with embeddings needs a separate provider for that one step.
The migration ledger
Everything in this table comes from Amp's own documentation, checked September 21, 2026. It is the part a feature comparison leaves out.
| Moves for free | Moves with work | Does not move |
|---|---|---|
AGENTS.md — Amp falls back to AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md, so one file serves Claude Code, Codex CLI and opencode too | Model IDs. Amp's mappings use canonical provider/model IDs that rarely match another endpoint's spelling, and Amp publishes no canonical ID list — read them from its Models picker | The live threads themselves. The content does come out — .md on any thread URL, and amp threads export T-… for the full JSON of threads you created — but the thread stays at ampcode.com, and no client here documents importing one |
Skills. Amp already searches .claude/skills/, ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.claude/plugins/cache/ and the agent-agnostic .agents/skills/ tree | The wire format. Amp's Custom URL defaults to chat-completions, while Codex CLI accepts only responses | Remote MCP definitions, which are stored by ampcode.com |
Local MCP servers. amp.mcpServers uses the same command/args/env and url/headers shape as most agents | Workspace policy. Enterprise workspace admins can forbid personal connections, so a per-user plan can be overridden by your employer | A workspace-level Global AGENTS.md, set by an admin under Workspace Settings, and orb state. A personal Global AGENTS.md is not in this column — Amp documents it at $HOME/.config/amp/AGENTS.md |
One residue worth knowing before you cancel: commits your Amp agent already made keep their Amp-Thread-ID and Co-authored-by: Amp trailers. The amp.git.commit.ampThread.enabled and amp.git.commit.coauthor.enabled settings that control those only affect future commits, so your git history goes on pointing back at Amp after you leave.
A worked estimate: the $20 the gate costs
Megawatt at $20 per month is the lowest tier that can add a Custom URL connection today. If that gate is the only thing you would be buying, it is worth seeing what the same money does as prepaid credit elsewhere. Assume one session of 200,000 uncached input tokens and 12,000 output tokens; rates are live Kunavo catalog prices per million tokens.
| Model | Input / output per 1M | Estimate per assumed session | Sessions per $20 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $0.40 / $2.00 | $0.104 | ~192 |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $1.20 / $6.00 | $0.312 | ~64 |
| GPT-5.6 Sol | $2.00 / $12.00 | $0.544 | ~36 |
| Claude Fable 5.1 | $7.00 / $35.00 | $1.820 | ~10 |
This is illustrative token arithmetic, not a measured task cost and not a bill ceiling, and it is deliberately not a like-for-like comparison: the $20 tier also carries the 45,000 minutes of orb time Amp lists against it, plus a discount Amp states only as an average — "Megawatt members get a 60% discount and Gigawatt members get a 65% discount on their Amp usage" — which is not a figure anyone can turn into dollars without knowing their own usage. It answers one narrow question — if the endpoint gate is the only reason you would subscribe, the free and open-source clients in the table above cost nothing to install. Session size is the variable that moves these numbers most, so scale by your own usage before treating any row as a budget. Kunavo's catalog amount is a billing floor rather than a cap: when the upstream reports its charge, the bill is the greater of catalog cost and upstream cost times the applicable markup. Cache charges and external tools sit outside this example, and the minimum top-up is $10 in prepaid credit — a funding minimum, not a task fee or a subscription. See billing details.
Doing the move, and how to roll it back
Keep your Amp account paid and working while you try the replacement. Copy the repository's AGENTS.md and skills tree as they are — they are already portable — then translate one MCP server and one model ID by hand, and run a single bounded task end to end before moving anything else. Read the charge your new provider account actually recorded for that task rather than trusting any estimate, this page's included. Rollback is cheap precisely because the rules and skills files are shared: deleting the new client's config file leaves your repository unchanged, and your Amp threads are still where they were.
Nothing here was runtime tested. Kunavo has run none of these clients against its endpoint, and Amp's Custom URL feature sits behind a paid tier plus an experimental flag, so no one here has created an Amp connection or seen the form — every statement above is a transcription of published documentation, not a compatibility result. A published setup guide is a configuration reference, not a test. Kunavo serves /v1/chat/completions, /v1/responses and /v1/messages, which covers the three wire formats Amp's Custom URL can speak and the one Codex CLI requires, but confirm behaviour in your own account.
Start with the client you picked: Claude Code, opencode, Cline or Codex CLI. If you are staying on Amp and just want the endpoint wired, the Amp integration guide covers the connection fields and repeats the tier gate. Create a Kunavo account when you are ready to fund a key.
Still deciding rather than leaving? Amp pricing breaks down the three meters, Amp vs Claude Code does that head-to-head in detail, and OpenAI-compatible API explains what a base URL swap does and does not change. If you arrived here from a retired client instead, Continue alternatives covers that route out.
FAQ
What are the best Amp Code alternatives?
There is no single best one, because the right choice depends on what pushed you out. If you want an arbitrary endpoint or gateway without paying for a tier, Claude Code, opencode and Cline all take a third-party base URL with no plan gate stated in their documentation. If you want Amp's hosted autonomous execution without metered cloud machines, OpenHands is the closest free analogue — MIT-licensed locally, with a free SaaS tier capped at 10 conversations per day — and Factory Droid is the paid peer, with its Droid Computers starting at the $100 Plus tier. If you want an IDE rather than a terminal, Cline (Apache-2.0) and Kilo Code (MIT, BYOK on the free tier) are the live options. If governance is the issue, goose has been under the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation since April 7, 2026. Prices and repository states checked September 21, 2026.
Can I use Amp with my own API key or gateway?
Both answers are true at once, and the difference decides whether you need to leave. A single-provider API key — Amp's documentation names Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI — and a consumer subscription such as ChatGPT or X Premium+/SuperGrok are ungated connection kinds, and Amp's pricing page lists "Bring your own keys (BYOK)" on the free Hobby tier. An arbitrary endpoint is different. Amp's Model Routing documentation, read September 21, 2026, says routers, gateways and Custom URL connections "are experimental and in early access for Megawatt, Gigawatt, and Enterprise customers only", and Amp publishes no general-availability date. So a vendor key works on a free account today; a gateway key does not.
Is Amp still a Sourcegraph product?
No. Amp announced on December 2, 2025 that it was spinning out of Sourcegraph to become an independent research lab, its About page opens "We are an independent agent research lab", and its Terms of Service name Amp Frontier Corporation. The spin-out is recent enough that search results still conflate the two, but Sourcegraph's own pricing and documentation no longer describe this product and must not be used for Amp figures. Checked September 21, 2026.
Do my AGENTS.md rules and skills move to another agent?
Mostly yes, and this is the cheapest part of the move. Amp reads AGENTS.md and, when a directory has none, falls back to AGENT.md or CLAUDE.md, so the same rules file already serves Claude Code, Codex CLI and opencode. Amp's skills search order includes .claude/skills/, ~/.claude/skills/, ~/.claude/plugins/cache/ and the agent-agnostic .agents/skills/ tree, so a skills directory is shared rather than converted. Local MCP servers move too, because amp.mcpServers uses the same command/args/env and url/headers shape most agents use. What does not move: a workspace-level Global AGENTS.md, which an admin sets under Workspace Settings and which applies to every member, and remote MCP definitions, which Amp's MCP documentation says are "stored by ampcode.com". A personal Global AGENTS.md is a different case — you edit it from the web app, but Amp documents it living at $HOME/.config/amp/AGENTS.md, so that one is already a file on your machine. Documentation checked September 21, 2026.
What happens to my Amp thread history if I leave?
Export it before you cancel — Amp documents how. Threads are Amp-hosted objects with URLs of the form ampcode.com/threads/T-…, and Amp's Threads documentation, read September 21, 2026, says "Add .md to a thread URL, for example https://ampcode.com/threads/T-….md, to read it as Markdown", that "Export in the More Actions menu offers Markdown and, for the thread's creator, the full JSON", and that "In the CLI, amp threads markdown T-… and amp threads export T-… do the same". So the content comes out, in Markdown for any thread you can read and in JSON for threads you created. What no documentation promises is the other half: no agent here is documented as importing an Amp thread, so treat the export as an archive you keep, not as history your next client will replay. Separately, commits your Amp agent already made keep their Amp-Thread-ID and Co-authored-by: Amp trailers; the settings that control those only affect future commits.
Is it cheaper to leave Amp or to upgrade it?
That depends on which meter is costing you, and the honest first step is to check whether the fix is inside Amp. Orb compute is billed by the minute from $0.08 per hour for a1.tiny to $2.13 per hour for a1.3xlarge, an orb pauses once the agent has done no work for 5 minutes and you have not interacted with it for 20, and Amp runs agents on your own computers through runners for free — so a large orb bill is often a configuration question first. If the tier gate on custom endpoints is the only thing you would be buying, Megawatt at $20 per month is the lowest tier that can add a Custom URL connection, and the clients whose documentation states no plan gate on a base URL cost nothing to install. Amp figures checked September 21, 2026.
Amp's pricing page, Model Routing documentation, orb Sizes & Costs page, Free Agent post, About page, news index, CLI configuration reference and its Threads, AGENTS.md, Skills and MCP documentation were re-read for this guide on September 21, 2026, as were Claude Code's environment-variable reference and Codex CLI's config reference. The other clients' prices, licences and release dates come from their own published pages and repository metadata on the same date and were not re-run here. Amp's $200 Gigawatt figure is a browser read of a client-side tab and does not appear in a plain fetch of the pricing page. Kunavo token rates come from the live catalog; every dollar example is illustrative token arithmetic rather than a measured task cost.