Free Claude via Amazon's back door

What it does

Kiro Gateway sits between your favorite coding assistant and Amazon’s Kiro IDE / AWS CodeWhisperer infrastructure. It translates Kiro’s proprietary authentication into bog-standard OpenAI and Anthropic API shapes, so you can point Cursor, Cline, Continue, or the OpenAI SDK at localhost:8000 instead of paying for API keys. The gateway handles token refresh, retries, and SSE streaming.

The interesting bit

The project treats Kiro’s free tier as an undifferentiated compute layer. It supports four distinct credential sources—JSON files, environment variables, AWS SSO caches, even kiro-cli’s SQLite database—and can round-robin across multiple accounts when one hits a rate limit. That’s not just convenience; it’s a hedge against Amazon changing the rules.

Key highlights

• Exposes both /v1/chat/completions (OpenAI) and /v1/messages (Anthropic) endpoints
• Automatic failover between multiple Kiro accounts on 429/402/5xx errors
• “Extended thinking” and vision support, per the README—features the authors claim are exclusive to this proxy
• Smart model name resolution: claude-sonnet-4.5, claude-sonnet-4-5, and versioned variants all normalize to the same backend model
• VPN/proxy support for corporate networks; Docker or native Python deployment

Caveats

• Model availability is entirely hostage to Kiro’s tier changes (Claude Opus 4.5 was already pulled from free tier in January 2026, per the README)
• The “Account System” is flagged as future default but currently optional and somewhat half-baked
• AGPL v3 license may complicate commercial use

Verdict

Worth a look if you’re already in the Kiro ecosystem and want to decouple your tools from Amazon’s IDE. Skip it if you need reliability guarantees or don’t want to play cat-and-mouse with a free tier’s terms of service.