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Comment by amunozo | Hacker News Reader

For those who rely on open source models but don't want to stop using frontier models, how do you manage it? Do you pay any of the Chinese subscription plans? Do you pay the API directly? After GPT 5.5 release, however good it is, I am a bit tired of this price hiking and reduced quota every week. I am now unemployed and cannot afford more expensive plans for the moment.

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I have $20 ChatGPT subscription. Stopped Anthropic $20 subscription since the limit ran out too fast. That's my frontier model(s).

For OSS model, I have z.ai yearly subscription during the promo. But it's a lot more expensive now. The model is good imo, and just need to find the right providers. There are a lot of alternatives now. Like I saw some good reviews regarding ollama cloud.

I am thinking about getting some 1 year promotion as a student before defending my PhD.

I've been on Kimi K2.5 on openrouter for a couple of months for anything I can't run locally. Really is dirt cheap for how good it is. Haven't assessed K2.6 yet but the price is higher so it needs to be more efficient, not just more capable.

But more broadly: openrouter solves the problem of making a broad range of models available with a single payment endpoint, so you can just switch around as much as you like.

How do you find the token speed of open router with kimi?

I have tasks that used to take ~3-5min with Sonnet 4.6. With OpenRouter Kimi, the same task takes 10+ min. It's also just obviously slower in opencode sessions. The results are good, and I love the lower cost, but the speed can be frustrating.

Mixed bag. Sometimes it's absolutely fine, sometimes it's not. I've been using opencode myself but I'm thinking of switching to pi partly to be able to take more control of the context.

Have you considered... not subscribing? You can ask the top models via chats for specific stuff, and then set up some free CLI like mistral.

If you're trying to make a buck while unemployed, sure get a subscription. Otherwise learn how to work again without AI, just focus on the interesting stuff.

I just want to try to make something useful out of my time, that's why I'm subscribed to Codex at the moment. 20€ is affordable, not really a problem. But yes, maybe I would do me a favor unsubscribing and going back to the old ways to learn properly.

I'm "working" on some open source stuff with minimal AI. But I will probably cave in at some point and get a subscription again, the moment I need to spin up a mountain of garbage, fast.

At home I currently use MiniMax via OpenRouter - it’s pretty good and very cheap. They have a subscription plan, but I’m not ready to commit to it yet.

Another way to keep the ability to try out new models is to buy a reseller subscription like Cursor’s.

I tried OpenRouter but I feel the money flies even with these models, it is not comparable to a subscription but yes, it's very good for trying. Maybe I should test other models alongside GPT 5.5 to see which one fits me.

I'm also unemployed. So far the models that I've used the most are Kimi and GLM. I haven't done that much agentic coding though, I've mostly used them for studying math and general conversations and I'm generally happy with their performance.

For DeepSeek you can use their API and if you ran it constantly you'd still be under what OpenAI or Anthropic charge for a coding plan.

I had Claude make me a quick tool to combine my Claude Code token usage (via ccusage util) with OpenRouter pricing from the models API

I'm on Max x5 plan and any of the 'good' models like Kimi 2.6, GLM, DeepSeek would have cost 3-5x in per-token billing for what I used on my Claude plan the last three months

So unless my Claude fudged the maths to make itself look better, seems like I'm getting a good deal

I am not so sure, credits fly when using any model trough API if I use it as much as I use Codex.

Gemini has a free tier for API but yeah just use chat.

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