Size the Orbs of Production! - Amp

People are using a lot of orbs. We love to see that. We've shipped a lot of things so that Amp subscriptions keep covering the whole month of orb usage for almost everyone, even as orb usage grows quickly.

Way back on July 27, we cut orb prices by 20% for everyone.

This week, we shipped a lot more improvements.

We added a new a1.medium size with 4 CPUs and 8 GB of memory. It is 50% cheaper and a better fit for most projects than the previous a0.medium.

Orbs now auto-pause after 5 minutes of inactivity, down from 15 minutes.

We've sped up orb startup time considerably, especially when another team member has recently created an orb in the same Amp project.

You can now choose which orb size to use per-thread, so you can pick a smaller default to save money but go big for especially resource-intensive work.

When starting new orb threads from the Amp CLI with amp -ox '...', the new flag --orb-size lets you specify which orb size to use (instead of the project's default).

When asking the agent to create other threads, you can now tell it to use smaller (or larger) orbs, which lets you use smaller orbs for simpler fan-out tasks on projects.

Prices for orbs have gone down or stayed the same at every level and for every compute/memory combination. The new set of orb sizes is:

a1.tiny: 1 CPU · 2 GB memory · $0.08/hour

a1.small: 2 CPUs · 4 GB memory · $0.17/hour

a1.medium: 4 CPUs · 8 GB memory · $0.33/hour

a1.large: 8 CPUs · 16 GB memory · $0.66/hour

a1.xxlarge: 16 CPUs · 32 GB memory · $1.32/hour

We've automatically upgraded projects to the equivalent new orb sizes. If you want to use a different orb size, you can update your projects' settings on the web, or ask Amp to do so using the amp projects subcommands.