alt Hacker NewsFor serious work, the difference between spending $10/month and $100/month is not even worth considering for most professional developers. There are exceptions like students and people in very low income countries, but I’m always confused by developers with in careers where six figure salaries are normal who are going cheap on tools.
I find even the SOTA models to be far away from trustworthy for anything beyond throwaway tasks. Supervising a less-than-SOTA model to save $10 to $100 per month is not attractive to me in the least.
I have been experimenting with self hosted models for smaller throwaway tasks a lot. It’s fun, but I’m not going to waste my time with it for the real work.
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$100 / month will get you rate limited to much to rely on with the Claude plans. People still report getting rate limited on the $200 / plan.
Also not everyone wants to use Claude Code, so if they're paying API pricing it's more likely thousands of dollars a month. If you can get the same results by spending a fraction of that, why wouldn't you?
For actually serious work, it's a stark difference if your proprietary and security relevant code is sent abroad to a foreign, possibly future hostile country, or is sent to some data center around the corner. It doesn't even need to be defence related.
You need to supervise the model anyway, because you want that code to be long-term maintainable and defect free, and AI is nowhere near strong enough to guarantee that anytime soon. Using the latest Opus for literally everything is just a huge waste of effort.