alt Hacker NewsI think you are kidding if you think you are going to be remotely approximately the quantity/quality of output you get from a $100/max sub with Zed/Openrouter. I easily get $1K+ of usage out of my $100 max sub. And that's with Opus 4.6 on high thinking.
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Yeah — I just created an anthropic API key to experiment with pi, and managed to spend $1 in about 30 minutes doing some basic work with Sonnet.
Extrapolating that out, the subscription pricing is HEAVILY subsidized. For similar work in Claude Code, I use a Pro plan for $20/month, and rarely bang up against the limits.
Some of the newer models available on OpenRouter are good, but I agree that none of them are a replacement for Opus 4.6 for coding.
If you're trying to minimize cost then having one of the inexpensive models do exploratory work and simple tasks while going back to Opus for the serious thinking and review is a good hybrid model. Having the $20/month Claude plan available is a good idea even if you're primarily using OpenRouter available models.
I think trying to use anything other than the best available SOTA model for important work is not a good tradeoff, though.
Not everyone is just vibecoding everything and relying on agents running sota models to do anything tho.
> I easily get $1K+ of usage out of my $100 max sub. And that's with Opus 4.6 on high thinking.
And people keep claiming the token providers are running inference at a profit.