I have done the same. I hesitated for way too long. I shouldn’t have.

I get way more usage for way less money without any quality or performance degradation. My $200 Codex Pro plan allowance is depleted in 2-3 days. Sometimes Tibo announces a usage reset. But GPT-5.6 models are really not good for coding. Sol has been making increasingly more mistakes in the past two weeks even in the reviewer and advisor roles. Astra is usable for coding but slow and very expensive. In the past two days I’ve used up over 70% on simple copy editing, with dedicated short specs and short sessions. Really little one can do to make it more efficient. Similar work took 20% at most just a month ago. I’m looking to use Astra for milestone reviews/advisory. Perhaps a $100 Pro downgrade will be enough. But my main work is now on open-weight models. And you don’t need to depend on someone to send you a reset. And it’s cheaper by the end of the month too.

With Claude the limits are not even fun anymore - my weekly $100 Max plan quota is gone in one day on merely review invocations, no coding. And my $200 Pro quota is gone in two with some coding. Sonnet 5 is not usable for coding. And Opus 5 tends to always make a couple avoidable mistakes on every task. Fable 5.1 is ok but tends to ignore skills and to work around explicit instructions. Completely canceled all my Claude subscriptions.

With Qwen 3.8, DeepSeek 4.1 Flash, GLM 5.3 I’ve been getting Opus 5-level performance, with less blah blah and no overengineered churn. Public benchmarks are really not telling the real story. The models are more dependable and more predictable. They have their own failure modes. Sometimes DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is quite stubborn but it fails in a good way. Bad for full autonomy - I need to intervene, but it sticks to the rails and instructions - other than Fable and Opus that try to outsmart you and your harness.

Grok is interesting but has been a bit underwhelming on Grok plans - my SuperGrok allowance is depleted in a single session overnight. SuperGrok+ gives more but it’s still about the same as with OpenAI, Claude is way less now.

Since the allowance volume has been shrinking with the major model providers, to me, open-weight alternatives are really necessary now to at least maintain the momentum and budget.

But at work it’s really an uphill challenge - it’s become impossible to convince the tech leadership once they got hooked on Anthropic. They No facts will help. Some people underestimate how expensive Claude really is after getting used to the subscription plans with allowance resets. OpenAI models are expensive too.