I use local models + openrouter free ones.

My monthly spend on ai models is < $1

I'm not cheap, just ahead of the curve. With the collapse in inference cost, everything will be this eventually

I'll basically do

    $ man tool | <how do I do this with the tool>

    $ cat source | <find the flags and give me some documentation on how to use this>

I've even made a IEITYuan/Yuan-embedding-2.0-en database of my manpages with chroma and then I can just ask my local documentation how I do something conceptually, get the man pages, inject them into local qwen context window using my mansnip llm preprocessor, forward the prompt and then get usable real results.

In practice it's this:

    $ what-man "some obscure question about nfs" 
    ...chug chug chug (about 5 seconds)...

    <answer with citations back to the doc pages>

It helps combat a frequent tendency for documentation authors to bury the most common and useful flags deep in the documentation and lead with those that were most challenging or interesting to program instead.

I understand the inclination it's just not all that helpful for me

The limits for the $20/month plan can be reached in 10-20 minutes when having it explore large codebases with directed. It’s also easy to blow right through the quota if you’re not managing content well (waiting until it fills up and then auto-compacting, or even using /compact frequently instead of /clear or the equivalent in different tools).

For most of my work I only need the LLM to perform a structured search of the codebase or to refactor something faster than I can type, so the $20/month plan is fine for me.

But for someone trying to get the LLM to write code for them, I could see the $20/month plans being exhausted very quickly. My experience with trying “vibecoding” style app development, even with highly detailed design documents and even providing test case expected output, has felt like lighting tokens on fire at a phenomenal rate. If I don’t interrupt every couple of commands and point out some mistake or wrong direction it can spin seemingly for hours trying to deal with one little problem after another. This is less obvious when doing something basic like a simple React app, but becomes extremely obvious once you deviate from material that’s represented a lot in training materials.

Yes, we are doing that. These tools help make my personal projects come to life, and the money is well worth it. I can hit Claude Code limits within an hour, and there's no way I'm giving OpenAI my money.

Me. Currently using Claude Max for personal coding projects. I've been on Claude's $20 plan and would run out of tokens. I don't want to give my money to OpenAI. So far these projects have not returned their value back to me, but I am viewing it as an investment in learning best pratices with these coding tools.

To me, it doesn’t matter how cheap open AI codex is because that tool just burns up tokens, trying to switch to the wrong version of node using NVM on my machine. It spirals in a loop and never makes progress, for me, no matter how explicitly or verbosely i prompt.

On the other hand, Claude has been nothing but productive for me.

I’m also confused why you don’t assume people have the intelligence to only upgrade when needed. Isn’t that what we’re all doing? Why would you assume people would immediately sign up for the most expensive plan that they don’t need? I already assumed everyone starts on the lowest plan and quickly runs into session limits and then upgrades.

Also coaching people on which paid plan to sign up for kinda has nothing to do with running a local model, which is what this article is about

If you're a hobbyist doing a side project, I'd start with Google and use anti-gravity, then only move to OpenAI when the project gets too complex for Gemini to handle things.

I also pay for the $100 plan as a researcher in biology dealing with a fair amount of data analysis in addition to bench work.

Incidentally, wondering if anyone has seen this approach of asking Claude to manage Codex:

https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1pbqt0v/using_codex_...

What I find perplexing is the very respectful people that pay those subscriptions to produce clearly sub-par work I'm sure they wouldn't have done themselves.

And when pressed on “this doesn't make sense, are you sure this works?” they ask the model to answer, it gets it wrong, and they leave it at that.

Claude's $20 plan should be renamed to "trial". Try Opus and you will reach your limit in 10 minutes. With Sonnet, if you aren't clearing the context very often, you'll hit it within a few hours. I'm sympathetic to developers who are using this as their only AI subscription because while I was working on a challenging bug yesterday I reached the limit before it had even diagnosed the problem and had to switch to another coding agent to take over. I understand you can't expect much from a $20 subscription, but the next jump up costing $80 is demotivating.

> If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.

> The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.

These are the same people, by and large. What I have seen is users who purely vibe code everything and run into the limits of the $20/m models and pay up for the more expensive ones. Essentially they're trading learning coding (and time, in some cases, it's not always faster to vibe code than do it yourself) for money.

When you look at how capable Claude is, vs the salary of even a fresh graduate, combined with how expensive your time is… Even the maximum plan is a super good deal.

I'm convinced the $20 gpt plus plan is the best plan right now. You can use Codex with gpt5.2. I've been very impressed with this.

(I also have the same MBP the author has and have used Aider with Qwen locally.)

I regularly hit my limits on the $200/mo Codex plan (using medium reasoning). (I am using everything for production - these aren't toy ideas.)

And as a hobbyist the time to sign up for the $20/month plan is after you've spent $20 on tokens at least a couple times.

YMMV based on the kinds of side projects you do, but it's definitely been cheaper for me in the long run to pay by token, and the flexibility it offers is great.

> The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.

leo dicaprio snapping gif

These kinds of articles should focus on use case because mileage may vary depending on maturity of idea, testing and host of other factors.

If the app, service, or whatever is unproven, that's a sunk cost on macbook vs. 4 weeks to validate an idea which is a pretty long time.

If the idea is sound then run it on macbook :)

When you pay $1000/month for health insurance and $2000/month for housing.. $200 for something you actually enjoy isn't so bad.

Time is my limiting factor, especially on personal projects. To me, this makes any multiplying effect valuable.

When I consider it against my other hobbies, $100 is pretty reasonable for a month of supply. That being said, I wouldn’t do it every month. Just the months I need it.

I’ve been using vs code copilot pro for a few months and never really had any issue, once you hit the limit for one model, you generally still have a bunch more models to choose from. Unless I was vibe coding massive amounts of code without looking to testing, it’s hard to imagine I will run out of all the available pro models.

On a $20/mo plan doing any sort of agentic coding you'll hit the 5hr window limits in less than 20 minutes.

Claude 4.5 Opus on Claude Code's $20 plan is funny because you get about 2-3 prompts on any nontrivial task before you hit the session limit.

If I wasn't only using it for side projects I'd have to cough up the $200 out of necessity.

this, provided you don't mind hopping around a lot, 5 20 dollar a month accounts will get you way more tokens typically, also good free models will show up from time to time on openrouter

I pay $200/mo just for Claude Code. I used Cursor for a while and used something like $600 in credits in Nov.

Codex $20 is a good deal but they have nothing inbetween $20 and $200.

The $20 Anthropic plan is only enough to wet my appetite, I can't finish anything.

I pay for $100 Anthropic plan, and keep a $20 Codex plan in my back pocket for getting it to do additional review and analysis overtop of what Opus cooks up.

And I have a few small $ of misc credits in DeepSeek and Kimi K2 AI services mainly to try them out, and for tasks that aren't as complicated, and for writing my own agent tools.

$20 Claude doesn't go very far.

Not everybody is broke.