I recommend kimi. It's possible for people to haggle with it to get cheap for the first month and as such try out your project and best part of the matter is that kimi intentionally supports api usage in any of their subscribed plan and they also recently changed their billing to be more token usage based like others instead of their previous tool calling limits

It's seriously one of the best models. very comparable to sonnet/opus although kimi isn't the best in coding. I think its a really great solid model overall and might just be worth it in your use case?

Is the use case extremely coding intensive related (where even some minor improvement can matter for 10-100x cost) or just in general. Because if not, then I can recommend Kimi.