For a lot of large scale day to day work, deepseek / zai models (the latter comes with a subscription) can be very cost effective and very competitive actually.

Another thing of note is that when coding at 'scale' to my surprise over time with memory aggregation across users/sessions these models can be better than the evals would have you believe because they seem to be differently/less (?) RL'ed (aka actually listen to instructions), which results in them being more fastidious about writing memories and benefiting from them, especially over time. These are of course mostly subjective opinions but they were surprising, and not what we were expecting.

Relevant: the proxy we wrote and use: https://yapp.latchlabs.dev is partially open sourced: still working on releasing more of our memories stuff.