Summarizer

Mostly chatgpt because I see 0 value in paying for any llm, nor do I wish to gice up my data to any llm provider

I use LLMs for code at work, but I've been a bit hesitant to dive in for side projects because I'm worried about the cost. Is it necessary to pay $200/mo to actually ship things or will $20/mo do it? Obviously I could just try it myself and see how far I get bit I'm curious to hear from someone a bit further down the path.

The $20/mo subscription (Claude Code) that I've been using for my side projects has been more than enough for me 90% of the time. I mostly use the cheaper models lately (Haiku) and accept that it'll need a bit more intervention, but it's for personal stuff and fun so that's ok. If you use VSCode, Antigravity or another IDE that's trying to market their LLM integration, then you'll also get a tiny allowance of additional tokens through them. I'll use it for a few hours at a time, a couple days a week, often while watching TV or whatever. I do side projects more on long rainy weekends, and maybe not even every week during the summer. I'll hit the limit if I'm stuck inside on a boring Sunday and have an idea in my head I really wanted to try out and not stop until I'm done, but usually I never hit the limit. I don't think I've hit the limit since I switched my default to Haiku FWIW. The stat's say I've generated 182,661 output tokens in the last month (across 16 days), and total usage if via API would cost $39.67.

$20 is fine. I used a free trial before Christmas, and my experience was essentially that my code review speed would've prevented me doing more than twice that anyway… and that's without a full time job, so if I was working full time, I'd only have enough free time to review $20/month of Claude's output. You can vibe code, i.e. no code review, but this builds up technical debt. Think of it as a junior who is doing one sprint's worth of work every 24 hours of wall-clock time when considering how much debt and how fast it will build up.

Depending on how much you use, you can pay API prices and get pretty far for 20 bucks a month or less. If you exhaust that, surprisingly, I recommend getting Gemini with the Google AI pro subscription. You can use a lot of the Gemini CLi for that

Check out the Google One AI Pro plan ($20/mo) in combination with Antigravity (Google's VS Code thingy) which has access to Opus 4.5. this combo (AG/AI Pro plan/Opus 5.5) is all the rage on Reddit with users reporting incredibly generous limits (which most users say they never meet even with high usage) that resets every 5 hours.

I have a feeling you are using SOTA models at work and aren't used to just how cheap the non-Anthropic/Google/OAI options are these days. GLM's coding subscription is like $6/month if you buy a full year.

You can use AI code editor that allows you to use your own API key, so you pay per-token, not a fixed monthly fee. For example Cline or Roo Code.

They all let you do that now, including Claude Code itself. You can choose between pay per token and subscription. Which means that a sensible way to go about those things is to start with a $20 subscription to get access to the best models, and then look at your extra per-token expenses and whether they justify that $200 monthly.

In practice, I find it depends on your work scale, topic and cadence. I started on the $20 plans for a bit of an experiment, needing to see about this whole AI thing. And for the first month or two that was enough to get the flavor. It let me see how to work. I was still copy/pasting mostly, thinking about what to do. As i got more confident i moved to the agents and the integrated editors. Then i realised i could open more than one editor or agent at a time while each AI instance was doing its work. I discovered that when I'm getting the AI agents to summarise, write reports, investigate issues, make plans, implement changes, run builds, organise git, etc, now I can alt-tab and drive anywhere between 2-6 projects at once, and I don't have to do any of the boring boiler plate or administrivia, because the AI does that, it's what its great for. What used to be unthinkable and annoying context switching now lets me focus in on different parts of the project that actually matter, firing off instructions, providing instructions to the next agent, ushering them out the door and then checking on the next intern in the queue. Give them feedback on their work, usher them on, next intern. The main task now is kind of managing the scope and context-window of each AI, and how to structure big projects to take advantage of that. Honestly though, i don't view it as too much more than functional decomposition. You've still got a big problem, now how do you break it down. At this rate I can sustain the $100 claude plan, but honestly I don't need to go further than that, and that's basically me working full time in parallel streams, although i might be using it at relatively cheap times, so it or the $200 plan seems about right for full time work. I can see how theoretically you could go even above that, going into full auto-pilot mode, but I feel i'm already at a place of diminishing marginal returns, i don't usually go over the $100 claude code plan, and the AIs can't do the complex work reliably enough to be left alone anyway. So at the moment if you're going full time i feel they're the sweet spot. The $20 plans are fine for getting a flavor for the first month or two, but once you come up to speed you'll breeze past their limitations quickly.

Wait till the VC tap gets shut off. You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div. ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed. Or: ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.

Seriously, they have got their HOOKS into these Vibe Coders and AI Artists who will pony up $1000/month for their fix.

I can absolutely see that happening. It's already kind of happened to me a couple of times when I found myself offline and was still trying to work on my local app. Like any addiction, I expect it to cost me some money in the future

Alternatively, just use a local model with zero restrictions.

The next best thing is to use the leading open source/open weights models for free or for pennies on OpenRouter [1] or Huggingface [2]. An article about the best open weight models, including Qwen and Kimi K2 [3]. [1]: https://openrouter.ai/models [2]: https://huggingface.co [3]: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/

This is currently negative expected value over the lifetime of any hardware you can buy today at a reasonable price, which is basically a monster Mac - or several - until Apple folds and rises the price due to RAM shortages.

This requires hardware in the tens of thousands of dollars (if we want the tokens spit out at a reasonable pace). Maybe in 3-5 years this will work on consumer hardware at speed, but not in the immediate term.

$2000 will get you 30~50 tokens/s on perfectly usable quantization levels (Q4-Q5), taken from any one among the top 5 best open weights MoE models. That's not half bad and will only get better!

If you are running lightweight models like deepseek 32B. But anything more and it’ll drop. Also, costs have risen a lot in the last month for RAM and AI adjacent hardware. It’s definitely not 2k for the rig needed for 50 tokens a second

Could you explain how? I can't seem to figure it out. DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp has 37B active parameters, GLM-4.7 and Kimi K2 have 32B active parameters. Lets say we are dealing with Q4_K_S quantization for roughly half the size, we still need to move 16 GB 30 times per second, which requires a memory bandwidth of 480 GB/s, or maybe half that if speculative decoding works really well. Anything GPU-based won't work for that speed, because PCIe 5 provides only 64 GB/s and $2000 can not afford enough VRAM (~256GB) for a full model. That leaves CPU-based systems with high memory bandwidth. DDR5 would work (somewhere around 300 GB/s with 8x 4800MHz modules), but that would cost about twice as much for just the RAM alone, disregarding the rest of the system. Can you get enough memory bandwidth out of DDR4 somehow?

That doesn't sound realistic to me. What is your breakdown on the hardware and the "top 5 best models" for this calculation?

I mean sure, that could happen. Either it's worth $200/month to you, or you get back to writing code by hand.

This is a poor analogy. Cars (mostly) don't require a subscription.

The reliance on SaaS LLMs is more akin to comparing owning a horse vs using a car on a monthly subscription plan.

I mean, they're taking away parts of cars at the moment. You gotta pay monthly to unlock features your car already has.

Just like the comment you replied to this is an argument against subscription model "thing" as a service business models, not against cars.

I'm trying to catch up with AI but it's difficult because most articles I find are kinda vague and there is a lack of clear examples. It's always about prompting or how AI "is great" yadi yada but hardly any step by step examples. I can easily ask gemini CLI to produce code for example. But how to work with AI in an existing codebase isn't obvious at all. It seems also that for any serious use you need a paid subscription? It seems like the free models just can't handle large codebases.

My guess is that the amount of total software people use will significantly increase, but the total amount of money made from SaaS will significantly decrease I've replaced almost all of the App subscriptions with stuff I built for my self. The only subscriptions I pay for are things that are almost impossible to replace like online storage (iCloud) or Spotify

Related question which might fit here so I'm going to try: What is the absolute cheapest way to get started on AI coding a simple website? I have a couple ideas I want to test out and get out of my head and onto the web but have resisted for years because my webdev knowledge is stuck in 2004 and I've had no desire to change that. These are not complicated things (all static, I think) but... I hate webdev. I am not really willing to pay to do any initial explorations, but if I like where things are going then, sure, I'll pay up. I have a decently powerful machine that can run things locally, but it is Windows (because I'm an EE, sadly), which does matter.

Google Gemini has a generous free tier. You could start by experimenting in AI Studio - https://aistudio.google.com/ - then have a go at coding agents using their Gemini CLI or Antigravity tools. For what you're describing the free tiers of the Claude and ChatGPT web apps would probably work fine too.

I think Google Antigravity works on a free account too, right?

Cloudflare has a ~zero cost hosting service if all you need is static web page.

And even more fun with tools/services like exe.dev! Also apparently the combined of Google Antigravity/$20 Google AI plan/Opus 4.5 is blowing up the AI community lately in Reddit. Apparently the limits right now of Opus thru Antigravity are insanely generous/incredible value. Obviously this could change at any time but perhaps Google has the funds/resources to continue to provide value like this in an attempt to capture the dev userbase / win the AI war.

We need better chatbots to fix the bugs from the current chatbots that fixed the bugs from the previous chatbots when they fixed the bugs from the previous generation of chatbots that….. Just give Sam Altman more and more of your money and he’ll make a more advanced chatbot to fix the chatbot he sold you that broke everything. You don’t even need to own a computer, just install an app on your phone to do it all. It doesn’t matter that regular people have been completely priced out of personal computing when GPT is just gonna do all the computing anymore anyway. Clearly a sustainable way forward for the industry.