alt Hacker NewsFor 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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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 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.
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.
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'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.