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Comment by grewil2 | Hacker News Reader

Are all of you pi users paying Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage? Or can you combine pi with a subscription?

So far API usage is a lot more expensive than subscription and if you need better models than Deepseek and Kimi, and you are not wealthy, I don’t see a way around this.

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You can also use PI with local models like Qwen3.5-35B-A3B [1] and they can be surprisingly good if you development in minimalistic/simple ways.

One game changer when it comes to tweaking configs that are optimized for your use case is that you can easily use a "more powerful" cloud model to identify a good enough config for your local server/pi settings combination [2] in a pattern that applies pretty much anywhere.

- [1] https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B

- [2] https://alexhans.github.io/posts/find-the-loop-story-first.h...

You can use both providers in Pi using subscriptions. Be careful with Anthropic though, it’s against their TOS.

Doesn’t using the Anthropic subscription this way get charged as extra usage, and thus effectively billed at API rates?

Oh, I stand corrected. It's been a while since I've used their models.

Glad we can still use OpenAI subscription through Pi.

I use my Anthropic subscription with Pi. I thought they would start charging me API usage at some point, but it never happened. (If it did happen, I would switch to open weights models.)

...funnily enough, a few hours after posting this, it stopped working.

Not if you run your own system prompt that does not explicitly contain the term "pi coding agent". Perhaps they string-match against some other stuff, too, but as long as you paraphrase the system prompt a bit, you should be fine.

That's hilarious

They had plans to do that for CLaude SDK and claude -p usage, but paused them indefinitely.

openai works well with subscription, as many non major providers subscriptions

I use OpenRouter, currently Kimi K3 which has been extremely effective.

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