You can accomplish quite a lot with smaller local models on reasonably priced pro tier hardware (not cheap hardware, but very attainable hardware for anyone making average software engineer money). Qwen 3.6 27B and 35BA3, Gemma 28B, and so on are incredibly beneficial even if Anthropic and OpenAI produce better options.

Failing that, GLM 5.2 is open weights, trades blows with current frontier models and widely available on commodity inference providers. And you could run it yourself if you do actually have the resources.