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Posted by kisamoto 12 hours ago

Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter(braw.dev)
226 points | 172 commentspage 2
siliconc0w 5 hours ago||
I'm running out of Claude session limits in a single planning + implementation session even when using sonnet for the implementation. This isn't even super complex work - it was refactoring a data model, modifying templates/apis/services, etc. It has also gotten notably more 'lazy' like it updated the data model and not the template until I specifically pointed that out.

My backup has been Opencode + Kimi K2. It's definitely not as strong as even Sonnet but it's pretty fast and is serviceable for basic web app work like the above.

frenchie4111 3 hours ago||
Does anyone use Zed with a monorepo?

I am in a situation where every sub-folder has its own language server settings, lint settings, etc. VSCode (and forks) can handle this by creating a workspace, adding each folder to the workspace, and having a separate .vscode per-folder. I haven't figured out how to do the same with Zed.

I would love to stop using VSCode forks

bachmeier 4 hours ago||
I just tried Zed with Gemma 4 to see how it does with local models. Impressive speed and quality for the small model with thinking off (E4B). Very slow for the big model with thinking turned on. We'll see if this is better than my current tools (primary is Codex CLI plus qwen3 coder next) but the first impression is good. Especially nice that it configured all of my ollama models automatically.
cbg0 10 hours ago||
I don't think there's currently better value than Github's $40 plan which gives you access to GPT5 & Claude variants. It's pay per request so not ideal for back-and-forth but great for building complex features on the cheap compared to paying per token.

Because GH is accessing the API behind the scenes, you should face less degradation when using Sonnet/Opus models compared to a Claude subscription.

Keep a ChatGPT $20 subscription alongside for back-and-forth conversations and you'll get great bang for buck.

rafaelmn 10 hours ago||
I'm still paying the 10$ GH copilot but I don't use it because :

  - context is aggressively trimmed compared to CC obviously for cost saving reasons, so the performance is worse
  - the request pricing model forces me to adjust how I work
Just these alone are not worth saving the 60$/month for me.

I like the VSCode integration and the MCP/LSP usage surprised me sometimes over the dumb grep from CC. Ironically VSCode is becoming my terminal emulator of choice for all the CLI agents - SSH/container access and the automatic port mapping, etc. - it's more convenient than tmux sessions for me. So Copilot would be ideal for me but yeah it's just tweaked for being budget/broad scope tool rather than a tool for professionals that would pay to get work done.

lbreakjai 9 hours ago|||
You can use your GH subscription with a different harness. I'm using opencode with it, it turns GH into a pure token provider. The orchestration (compacting, etc.) is left to the harness.

It turns it into a very good value for money, as far as I'm concerned.

rafaelmn 9 hours ago|||
But you still get charged per turn right ? I don't like that because it impacts my workflow. When I was last using it I would easily burn through the 10$ plan in two days just by iterating on plans interactively.
lbreakjai 9 hours ago||
Honestly I'm not sure, I'm on my company's plan, I get a progress bar vaguely filling, but no idea of the costs or billing under the hood.
sourcecodeplz 5 hours ago|||
But you still get the reduced context-window.
briHass 10 hours ago|||
Disagree entirely.

GHCP at least is transparent about the pricing: hit enter on a prompt= one request. CC/Codex use some opaque quota scheme, where you never really know if a request will be 1,2,10% of your hourly max, let alone weekly max.

I've never seen much difference with context ostensibly being shorter in GHCP, all of the models (in any provider) lose the thread well before their window is full, and it seems that aggressive autocompaction is a pretty standard way to help with that, and CC/Codex do it frequently.

rafaelmn 9 hours ago||
>I've never seen much difference with context ostensibly being shorter in GHCP, all of the models (in any provider) lose the thread well before their window is full, and it seems that aggressive autocompaction is a pretty standard way to help with that, and CC/Codex do it frequently.

Then we've had wildly different results. Running CC and GH copilot with Opus 4.6 on same task and the results out of CC were just better, likewise for Codex and GPT 5.4. I have to assume it's the aggressive context compaction/limited context loading because tracking what copilot does it seems to read way less context and then misses out on stuff other agents pick up automatically.

neya 10 hours ago|||
Is your source code worth only $40 for them to train their models on?

https://www.techradar.com/pro/bad-news-skeptics-github-says-...

cbg0 10 hours ago||
Considering how much data they already have from everything that's on GitHub, I doubt you would make a dent boycotting their AI product.
spwa4 8 hours ago||
And don't you think they're going to realize soon that it's also pretty good at "doing penetration testing" for your company when it's already trained on your company's source code?
cbg0 7 hours ago||
It's already more than "pretty good": https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing
walthamstow 9 hours ago||
Google $20/mo plan has great usage for Claude Opus. Last time I used it, around Feb, it felt basically unlimited.
no1youknowz 3 hours ago|||
Agree, that was Feb. Not now, I cancelled mine on the 7th. Claude Opus via Gemini is just a few prompts then it locks you out for another week.
auggierose 9 hours ago|||
So, you basically tried it a century ago...
WhitneyLand 4 hours ago||
>>For some reason Zed limits the Gemini 3.1 context to 200k tokens

It’s not just Zed, CoPilot also reduces the capabilities and options available when using models directly.

No thanks, definitely agree with the Open Router approach or native harness to keep full functionality.

_pdp_ 10 hours ago||
Our bank (a major retail bank in UK) is refusing doing business with OpenRouter and OpenRouter issued a refund which we did not request. So something is up. There is that.

I might be paranoid but I feel that access to models will become more constraint in the future as the industry gets more regulated.

chid 10 hours ago||
I don't quite understand what you mean by something is up. Was the reason around security/telemetry or similar?
_pdp_ 9 hours ago||
Bank refused to provide reasons - even after a formal complaint was raised with them.

We are not the only one. I found other people online experiencing the same issue. It is hard to tell how wide-spread this is but it is strange to say the least.

mayama 8 hours ago||
OpenRouter accepts crypto for payments. That should have raised some flags with banks.
tiku 4 hours ago||
Im using z.ai when I hit my Claude limit after a few questions..drops in easily in Claude code.
candl 8 hours ago||
What providers offer nowadays coding plans, so no pricing per tokens, just api call limit and a monthly fee. Which are affordable?
pixel_popping 10 hours ago|
It should be noted about Openrouter that you aren't allowed to expose the access to end users, it has to be for internal usage only, which can be fatal as they have made waves of account banning lately (without warnings).
numlocked 9 hours ago|
You are absolutely allowed to expose access to end users, as long as you continue to abide by terms of service. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of apps built on openrouter that in turn have end users of their own. We showcase many of them on our /apps ranking page!
pixel_popping 7 hours ago|||
TOS says: access the Site or Service for purposes of reselling API access to AI Models or otherwise developing a competing service;

So yes obviously you can do what you want as long as you abide by terms of service, but the terms of service does NOT allow you to resell the API.

senko 5 hours ago||
> you aren't allowed to expose the access to end users, it has to be for internal usage only,

> TOS says: access the Site or Service for purposes of reselling API access to AI Models or otherwise developing a competing service;

I think what you meant is "you aren't allowed to expose the access to the API to end users", which is a fair condition IMHO.

You're still allowed to expose the functionality (ie. build a SaaS or AI assistant powered by OpenRouter API), just don't build a proxy.

pixel_popping 4 hours ago||
To be clear, I like Openrouter and recommend it to many people (I don't aim to "shit on it").

It does talk about a competing service, if I build a service that propose all the image gen models of Openrouter, and charge the user for it per token, am I allowed?

himata4113 9 hours ago|||
I was actually wondering about this since I've seen like 3 comments talking about the same thing, would it happen to be related to money laundering due to the availability of the crypto payment method?
Deathmax 8 hours ago||
The comments are all from the same author.

OpenRouter recently started enforcing account-level regional restrictions for providers that enforce it (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) - ie blocking accounts that look like they are being used by users in China. The regional restriction used to be based on the Cloudflare edge worker IP's geolocation and enforced upstream, so a proxy/server running inside of supported regions would get around the geoblocks, but now OpenRouter are using (unspecified) signals like your billing address to geoblock. People say "banned" because the error message says "Author <provider> is banned", which really should be read as "Unable to use models from provider due to upstream ban".

pixel_popping 7 hours ago||
Which further strengthen the fact that you can't do anything you want with API keys, even if you pay for them.
himata4113 7 hours ago||
there is a huge gap between 'doing whatever you want' and 'illegal activities' as well as upstream restrictions (out of openrouters control)
pixel_popping 6 hours ago||
What illegal activity? What another user pointed out about crypto isn't it, I'm talking about the fact that you can't open a service through Openrouter and charge your users per Token (aka "reselling" Openrouter), since when is this illegal?
blastslot 5 hours ago|||
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Maticslot 5 hours ago|||
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