Amazon
- Amazon’s Q Developer lags behind rivals in terms of revenue, internal data shows.
- Annual recurring revenue generated by the service is modest versus some competitors.
- Amazon plans to refine Q branding as internal demand grows for external tools like Cursor.
Amazon’s AI coding assistant Q Developer saw revenue fall behind rivals in its first year, prompting the company to reassess its broader branding plans, Business Insider has learned.
As of late April, a full year since its launch, Q Developer’s projected annual recurring revenue was $16.3 million, according to an internal document obtained by BI. The forecast was based on roughly $317,000 in weekly revenue and $1.25 million over the trailing 4-week period.
ARR is a common industry metric that extrapolates weekly or monthly revenue streams into an annualized figure.
Q Developer’s growth might have stood out in earlier years, but it looks modest in today’s rapidly accelerating AI industry, according to Jason Lemkin, managing director of SaaStr Fund.
For instance, Anysphere’s Cursor coding tool crossed $500 million in ARR in June after reaching $100 million earlier this year. Another popular AI coding assistant Windsurf reported $82 million in ARR in July, less than a year into its launch. Even younger AI startups like Gamma and Higgsfield hit $50 million in ARR in less than a year, underscoring Q Developer’s comparatively slower growth, Lemkin said.
“It’s not as jaw-dropping as it used to be,” Lemkin told BI, referring to Q Developer’s growth. “AWS has fallen behind in the AI race.”
An Amazon spokesperson wrote in an email that it is “continuing to innovate rapidly” to grow Q, with firms including ADP, Deloitte, and Japan Research Institute among active users.
“We’re extremely pleased with the accelerating growth of Amazon Q, where daily usage of Q Developer has increased 9-fold per person this year,” the spokesperson added.
Refining the Q brand
Q is a key AI product category for Amazon, akin to Microsoft’s Copilot. Q Developer is a AI coding assistant for developers, while Q Business is an AI chatbot targeting general business users.
But Q has yet to gain widespread recognition, and Amazon is now looking to refine the Q branding, according to several Amazon employees who spoke to BI. These people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Q Business is also undergoing a major revamp with the forthcoming Quick Suite, BI previously reported.
Several Amazon employees told BI that AWS lacks a strong reputation for AI-powered developer tools. They said generative AI took AWS by surprise, leading the company to rush new products without comprehensive feature sets.
Amazon’s spokesperson told BI that Q Developer continues to receive positive feedback from customers, and it is the most widely used internal tool at the company.
“We are seeing more and more customers, from startups to large enterprises, adopt Q Developer to make their teams more productive,” the spokesperson said.
Amazon employees want Cursor
For Amazon, the AI coding market is too big to walk away from. Gartner projects that by 2028, 40% of new business software will be built with such tools.
Yet even inside Amazon, employees appear to favor external products like Cursor over Q Developer.
Internal Slack messages reviewed by BI earlier this year showed that Amazon was planning to deploy Cursor internally after strong employee demand. In one message, an employee wrote that Cursor can make “almost instantaneous” changes, while Q Developer takes “minutes.”
Even Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has taken note. He previously said Q Developer saved Amazon “4,500 developer years of work” and an estimated $260 million in “annualized efficiency gains.” On May’s earnings call, however, he pointed to Cursor, an AWS cloud customer, as a major force behind the “explosion of coding agents.”
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