There are solid, cheap options like xAI, z.AI, MiniMax, Kimi, DeepSeek, and Alibaba. Heck, I can run a coding agent on my 32GB MacBook Pro M1 right now and it's actually pretty good (just slow). No one is forced to keep paying OpenAI and Anthropic. That's their major strategic risk: distilled models are far cheaper to build and run and they're only a few months behind.