alt Hacker News> The best "free" experience I've found is using OpenCode with Big Pickle.
I have absolutely zero interest in free. I honestly don't think I'm even remotely in the same demographic as people using free tiers / models.
I want to pay. I don't want my data used for training. I want it to be open. I want it to be consistently up (more than Claude!). I want it to be fast. I don't want it to be subsidized as that's just an excuse for shitty quality. Deepseek flash knocks it out of the park on all of these except you're data is used in training. I'm fine with it being hosted since there's no way I'm using it 24/7, but data MUST be private.
Basically I want Hetzner and OVH to run open model clouds. I'm convinced this is going to happen eventually when everyone realizes this is a commodity.
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I'm probably somewhat adjacent to you. I would be happy to pay, but I just don't want to pay any of the companies that are actually offering things right now. I had the $20/month sub for Claude for a couple months, until one day I kept inexplicably getting errors saying I hit the limit even though their site showed my usage at less than half for the session and 8% for the week, and it seemed silly to pay for something that couldn't even properly respect its own measurements. OpenAI sketches me out too much as a company, Cursor feels lackluster when I use it for work from the account they pay for (and now is getting acquired by maybe the only AI company even sketchier than OpenAI), and I wasn't particularly impressed with Gemini or Mistral Vibe either when I tried them on the free tiers either.
Hard to guarantee it's private if you don't keep it local... I don't have a lot of trust for companies in this space.
You can pay, and also use deepseek-v4-flash. OpenRouter even lets you "block" or limit your usage to providers that don't train on data. Since the weights are open, other companies are already serving the model on non-DeepSeek owned hardware: https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash
You can specify which providers you want to serve your model in OpenRouter. Then you can chose US-based ones.
These competent open models you want to use were trained on data from people like you and me.
I wonder if there are competent models trained purely on permissive open-source code like MIT or Apache 2.0.
> Basically I want Hetzner and OVH to run open model clouds
You can run Qwen3 on OVH already:
<https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/public-cloud/ai-endpoints/catalo...>