What kind of usage chews through Claude Max x20? I use several agents with max effort in parallel and usually end up with something like 50% weekly usage. Fable almost allowed me to get to 70% but then they started resetting the limits mid-week and of course now ended the whole thing.

Opencode's free models have been fine for me, they're what I tried after Gemma 4 8B proved hard to persuade into usefulness (I want to revisit with 12B and messing with harnesses, but I'm happy for now).

Ha just wrote a post[1] about a sort of 4th option - max out cheap compute to create more tangible things that can be used/run locally.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519181

> and the hardware you buy today may look like a bad bet in a year.

3090s and 7900s are going well so far.

Next year an Arc Pro B70 won't produce you less tokens than today.

Hardware and provider juggling is a way to go, although I think it is also worth mentioning that the cost is not only the price-per-token, but first of all, the amount of tokens used.

Depending on what one builds, comprehensive documentation and applicable skills and memory tools often allow for a substantial reduction of tokens previously used by the agent to comprehend and remember what is being built

There’s a lot of Xeon chips for $10 on eBay. Too bad there’s no drive for cpu based inference. The data center will need to swap out the older gpu clusters so what does that do for hardware pricing on data center gpus? H100 are cheap enough but the power requirements make it a long term net negative for how much pay for power in California.

Instead of openrouter (which is admittedly a good service) I've switched to EU only servers via https://cortecs.ai/

If you hunt in the settings you can restrict your account to only use EU servers for inference... Which means you can't use a lot of the US frontier models, but you can use all the Chinese ones, albeit within EU GDPR, etc.

This to me is a good compromise between privacy and cost.

Did you just copy-and-paste an AI response an post it on your blog?

This month I've spent only 15 cents using DeepSeek API and my own coding agent. Three apps delivered to clients and currently working on a tournament management app for pickleball, padel and beach tennis. I love DeepSeek.