I subscribed to Claude Pro for one month earlier this year. The subscription lasts as long as you chat with it in the UI. The moment you use Claude Code, it becomes useless and you keep hitting limits. So, great for hammering out a specification, not so great for actually writing and debugging code.

I have a lot of hobby projects and cannot afford to drop $200/m for assistance from LLMs with above average intelligence. The Chinese models work quite well, and are cost effective, in comparison. My usage over the last few months:

- Gemini / AI Studio = translations

- Kimi 2.5 / OpenCode Go = Compiler/VM project, AI for some board games, a new document format and compiler for it,

- DS4 Flash / DeepSeek (had some credits lying around) + OpenCode Go = Template-based OCR engine

- MiMo 2.5 and MuseSpark 1.2 Contributor = The OCR engine + a product I am brainstorming + a lot of single page tools

If you select models judiciously, and can write good AGENTS.md and extremely short but potent ARCHITECTURE.md documents, the $10 you pay to OpenCode Go will last a long while even when you consume a hundreds of millions of tokens (mostly cache hits) a day. You can get multiple models to perform code review of modules against the ARCHITECTURE you have specified and get other models to execute the fixes.