There's nothing wrong with making really simple small scripts. I do that as well; I'm sure everyone does. However, imo for anything ambitious, $20 buys you about a day give or take before your weekly quota gets eaten. I've been able to burn that in less than a day with about 2-3 sessions. (No, my projects aren't even close to Azure in scale.) To avoid that, you would have to do a lot of optimization like having your frontier subcription orchestrate openrouter agents to do the actual work. I'm not even sure that's possible because my $20 sub burned with just analysis and not implementation AND it was using a lot of tools to offload deterministic work.