My company has a Claude Code and Codex one and I use Claude Code because I am more familiar with it. That said, I just use Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation and it's pretty cheap. Codex seems decent too so I should try it out some more.

But you can get an awful lot done even with just like $200 a month at API pricing if you are careful not to waste a powerful model on an easy task, or carry around a bloated context window etc.

I think a lot of the 'tokenmaxxing' people spending thousands every month are simply using the tools ineffectively (like having loads of Opus agents doing tasks that Sonnet or even Haiku could do). I suspect this will only get worse now with the release of Fable, but Anthropic must love it.

When you say the cheaper models do you mean like Deepseek or GLM? I haven't tried those but they look interesting. It'd be nice to shift to open weights and not be tied to one company.