Amazon Q Business Is Closing to New Customers on July 31, 2026

If you are mid-evaluation on Amazon Q Business, the decision just got made for you. AWS's documentation now carries a banner on every Q Business page, and it is unambiguous: "Amazon Q Business will no longer be open to new customers starting on July 31, 2026. If you would like to use the service, please sign up prior to July 30."

That is a matter of days from the time this was written. This article covers what the change actually means, who it affects and how, and what the realistic options are depending on where you sit today.

What exactly did AWS announce?

Three things, and it is worth separating them because they get conflated.

First, a hard date for new business. From July 31, 2026, you cannot become a new Amazon Q Business customer. AWS's own wording asks prospective customers to sign up prior to July 30, which in practice makes July 30 the last usable day.

Second, an explicit commitment to existing customers. AWS writes that Q Business "remains fully supported and AWS will continue to provide bug fixes and security updates for existing customers." There is no announced shutdown date, no end-of-life, no forced migration deadline. Anyone telling you Q Business is being switched off is going further than AWS has.

Third, and most consequential for anyone planning three years out, the roadmap stops: "new feature requests will no longer be considered." The product you have is broadly the product you keep.

Is Amazon Q Business being discontinued?

No. Closed to new customers is not the same as discontinued, and the distinction matters when you are writing a risk register. AWS has published no shutdown date, no end-of-maintenance date and no end-of-support date for Q Business. Existing deployments continue to run with security patching and bug fixes.

What you should plan around is stagnation rather than termination. A product that no longer accepts feature requests will drift further behind each quarter, in a category where the capability bar is moving unusually fast. The practical risk is not that Q Business stops working next year. It is that in 2028 it is doing what it does today while everything around it has moved on.

Both AWS search products closed within 24 hours of each other

This is the part most coverage has missed. Amazon Kendra, AWS's original enterprise search service, entered Maintenance Mode on June 30, 2026 and stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Amazon Q Business closes to new customers on July 31, 2026.

Read together, these are not two unrelated deprecations. They are AWS consolidating a fragmented lineup. Kendra was retrieval infrastructure, Q Business was the assistant built on top of it, and both are being folded into newer platforms: Bedrock Knowledge Bases for the retrieval layer, Amazon Quick for the end-user assistant. Strategically that is defensible. Operationally it means that if you built on either one, you have a project.

What should I do if I have not signed up yet?

You have three honest options, and the deciding factor is how committed you are to staying inside AWS.

Option one: sign up before July 30 anyway. Legitimate in exactly one case, that you have already completed an evaluation, Q Business won on merit, and you want the grandfathered position while you plan. Going from zero to a production decision in the days remaining is not a real plan, and you would be buying onto a frozen roadmap.

Option two: start on Amazon Quick. The AWS-native answer, and the one AWS wants. Quick is broader than Q Business, adding Flows for workflow automation, Research, Spaces and QuickSight for analytics on structured data. If you want an agentic platform rather than a search box, this is the right target. Budget for the scope: Professional and Enterprise tiers carry a $250 per account per month infrastructure fee on top of $20 and $40 per user per month respectively.

Option three: buy outside AWS. The case for this is stronger than it was a month ago. If what you actually wanted was one search box across Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce that returns an answer you can verify, that is a narrower job than Quick is built for, and you can get it without an AWS account, an index to provision by the hour, or a migration in your future. That is what an Amazon Q Business alternative looks like in practice.

What should I do if I am already a Q Business customer?

Nothing urgent, which is the genuinely good news here. There is no deadline pointed at you. Use the time deliberately rather than deferring the question for two years.

Start by inventorying what you actually built, because that determines migration cost more than anything else. AWS gives you the commands for the data source side:

aws qbusiness list-data-sources \
  --application-id <your-application-id> \
  --index-id <your-index-id>

Then catalogue the things that are not data sources: your plugins, Q Apps, web experience customizations, guardrails and document attribute configurations. Those are where the migration effort concentrates, because several of them do not carry across. Q Apps, Actions and guardrails are all excluded from Bring Your Own Index and have to be recreated in Quick, with Q Apps rebuilt as Quick Flows.

Next, check which identity model you are on, because it changes the difficulty substantially. If you authenticate through IAM Identity Center, migration is comparatively clean. If you are on IAM federation, native identities or AWS Managed Microsoft AD, AWS is candid that you face "a more complex migration" involving manual scripting to reproduce per-user access controls. We covered that gap in detail in what happens to document-level permissions when you migrate.

Finally, treat this as a real evaluation window rather than an automatic renewal. You are being asked to re-platform regardless. The question of whether the destination should be Amazon Quick or something else is legitimately open, and it is cheaper to ask now than after you have rebuilt every Q App as a Flow. Teams re-examining their connector strategy at the same time often find that the wiring between systems, not the search layer, is the part that needs rethinking, and a dedicated platform for connecting apps, APIs and databases can take that piece off the search product entirely.

What does this mean for the enterprise search market?

Two AWS products closing to new customers in the same week is a signal about where the category is heading, and the signal is consolidation around assistants rather than indexes.

Kendra was sold as managed enterprise search: you gave it connectors, it gave you ranked passages, and you built the experience. Q Business was the first attempt at packaging that as an end-user product. Both are being replaced by things that assume the deliverable is an answer, not a result set, and increasingly that the assistant should also act on your behalf.

The part that has not been solved by anyone, AWS included, is permissions at scale. It is the hardest requirement in this category and the one that quietly determines whether a rollout is safe. AWS's own migration documentation is unusually honest about it: in a non-IAM-Identity-Center configuration, "all Amazon Quick users automatically receive access to connected indexes," and the documented remedy is to split content into separate knowledge bases and script permissions back on. That is a real engineering task, not a checkbox, and it is worth weighing in any comparison.

Frequently asked questions

When does Amazon Q Business stop accepting new customers?

July 31, 2026. AWS's documentation states the service "will no longer be open to new customers starting on July 31, 2026" and asks anyone who wants it to "please sign up prior to July 30." That makes July 30 the last practical day to become a customer.

Will Amazon Q Business be shut down?

AWS has not announced a shutdown. The published position is that Q Business remains fully supported for existing customers with continued bug fixes and security updates, and no end-of-life or end-of-support date has been given. The confirmed change is that no new customers are accepted and new feature requests are no longer considered.

What is replacing Amazon Q Business?

Amazon Quick, also written Amazon Quick Suite. AWS describes it as "the next evolution of Amazon Q Business" and recommends that customers migrate their Q Business applications to it. Quick adds Flows for workflow automation, Research, Spaces for knowledge management and QuickSight integration for analytics on structured data.

Is Amazon Kendra affected too?

Yes, and slightly earlier. Amazon Kendra entered Maintenance Mode on June 30, 2026 and stopped accepting new customers on July 30, 2026. Existing Kendra customers keep bug fixes and security updates with no published shutdown date, and AWS points them to Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases for similar capabilities.

Do I have to migrate off Amazon Q Business right now?

No. There is no deadline for existing customers, so there is no need to rush a migration this quarter. The reason to plan is the frozen roadmap rather than any cutoff. Use the time to inventory your Q Apps, plugins and guardrails, confirm your identity model, and evaluate destinations properly instead of migrating under pressure later.

Where to go from here

If you are evaluating right now, the shortlist just changed shape. AWS-native buyers should be looking at Amazon Quick and reading the migration guide before committing. Everyone else has a genuine opening to ask whether the search layer needs to live in their cloud provider at all.

InSearch takes the narrower path deliberately: one query across Drive, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Gmail, Jira and Salesforce, a written answer with inline citations to the exact sources, and item-level permissions inherited from each app and enforced at query time. No AWS account, no index units billed by the hour, no per-account infrastructure fee, and nothing to migrate off in two years. Try a question in the box above and see what comes back.