alt Hacker NewsFor personal use I’m considering using the frontier models from openai or anthropic to create a plan with research and brainstorming etc with enough details for cheap models to be able to follow (glm, deepseek etc) - with openrouter - will monitor how cheap and effective that turns out to be.
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Seconding the recommendation to use Deepseek directly via the API. I've burnt 287 million tokens in the last couple of days, costing me a whopping $5.77 USD.
For my case Openrouter breaks Deepseek caching and charges me multiple times over what I pay for Deepseek's API, with 2$ I was able to get around 120M tokens from deepseek easily when Openrouter could only barely do 250k
I call this the reviewer/implementer pattern.. Opus for planning then ds4/qwen/kimi for.implementation then opus for PR review
You should try out the cheaper models first. I find Deepseek v4 models pretty comparable to sonnet 4.6 but at a fraction of the cost. You might find you just don't need to use the American models at all.