alt Hacker NewsSome time ago I canceled all my paid subscriptions to chatbots because they are interchangeable so I just rotate between Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek and Mistral.
On the API side of things my experience is that the model behaving as expected is the greatest feature.
There I also switched to Openrouter instead of paying directly so I can use whatever model fits best.
The recent buzz about ad-based chatbot services is probably because the companies no longer have an edge despite what the benchmarks say, users are noticing it and cancel paid plans. Just today OpenAI offered me 1 month free trial as if I wasn’t using it two months ago. I guess they hope I forget to cancel.
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> I guess they hope I forget to cancel.
Business model of most subscription based services.
Maybe give Perplexity a shot? It has Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Kimi K2, I dont think it has Mistral unfortunately.
> because they are interchangeable
What is your use-case?
Mine is: I use "Pro"/"Max"/"DeepThink" models to iterate on novel cross-domain applications of existing mathematics.
My interaction is: I craft a detailed prompt in my editor, hand it off, come back 20-30 minutes later, review the reply, and then repeat if necessary.
My experience is that they're all very, very different from one another.
Yep I spent 3 days optimizing my prompt trying to get gpt-5 to work. Tried a bunch of different models (some Azure some OpenRouter) and got a better success rate with several others without any tailoring of the prompt.
Was really plug and play. There are still small nuances to each one, but compared to a year ago prompts are much more portable