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Comment by justauserid | Hacker News Reader

What's the best bang for the buck ≈$10–20 (per-month/equivalent) subscription for a good enough model these days?

I've tried a few, best so far: DeepSeek API credits.

- OpenCode Go $10: I feel like most of the models are lower quality than directly from the provider. If you ignore my "vibes": the value is very good for e.g. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash (not sure if they're serving 1017 yet), GLM 5.3 Flash, Qwen3.8 Flash and Claude Haiku 5.5.

- Z.AI: Tried the $18/month plan and was disappointed by the usage limits. Even with GLM 5.3 Flash I ran into the 5h limit pretty quickly.

- OpenAI: I tried the $20 plan and $100 plan. $20 ran into 5h limits very quickly with anything other than Luna models. $100 felt like pretty good value for GPT 6.1 Sol, but as others frequently repeat: it's probably heavily subsidized and won't be around forever.

- DeepSeek API credits: I can let a single agent run all day (and not worry about keeping the context small) and am usually around $1 usage for the day. Flash 4.1 1017 is also a very good model IMO. For the stuff I've used it with it hasn't felt any worse than GPT 6.1 Sol. The benefit of API credits is also that they don't expire at the end of the month (like unused subscription usage).

- I haven't tried any of Anthropic's subs, but my guess is you can get a lot of Claude Haiku 5.5 usage out of the $20 plan which is definitely a good model. I'm just not a huge fan of Anthropic or Claude Code, so I haven't tried it.

You can even run Sonnet 6.1 on a daily basis for $20. You just have to take some weekends off. After the Deepseek price increase, I run 95% Sonnet, and 5% kimi.

Sonnet 6.1?!

Sorry, mixed it up with Sol. Sonnet 5.5 of course, then Sol 6.1.

I don't think anything compares to Anthropic's plans. You still won't get much mileage out of the $20 plan, but it feels like it's 5x as much as other $20 plans.

The Max 20x plan is incredible value. I am able to burn something like $2k in tokens each week without consuming any credits.

I've been getting by on the Claude 20 a month plan for nearly a year but Opus 5.5 is so productive for me that I'm getting more done than before and still want to upgrade.

It depends on how you use your subscription. If you are "vibe coding" and spinning up a lot of subagents in parallel, a $10-20 subscription won't be enough. If you usually open one or two terminals at a time, and use it like you are peer programming with it, then Anthropic (Opus 5.5) or OpenAI (Sol 6.1) are the best $20 subscriptions.

Opencode go with DeepSeek is endless and hard to max out for 10 dollars. ChatGPT Sol 5 hour window is limiting but they keep resetting the weekly budget I haven't had a chance to use my monthly reset and it's a better model compared to deepseek. Claude gets used up quickly. Grok is okay but it's image generating has become the worst.

If you need endless calls opencode go is the best. If you want a model you can trust more that can generate images use ChatGPT.

I have open go and chatgpt personal subscriptions and use Claude at work where I often spent $200 a day.

20$ chatgpt plus sub with pi harness and a few api credits in openrouter.sometiemd I use sol for planing and glm flash for implementation bu

For coding or what?

For general purpose LLM, you can't beat Gemini AI Pro. It's $200/year and you can add your whole household.

I’m not sure who this plan is for honestly, for general purpose LLMs in the Gemini-quality-tier how are you using enough tokens to justify $200 / month over just using deepseek over openrouter? And if you need a more capable model than that, like Gemini 4 argon, why not get a Claude subscription? Maybe the family sharing parts make it worth it?

$200...PER YEAR.

I've had Gemini AI pro since last December and honestly (apart from nano banana) the biggest pluses for me are the addons, the google drive space, less ads on youtube, more nano banana, more veo in flow. However Argon is interesting. Don't like the split between the chat window and antigravity currently though.

I guess the question is what do you want to do with it? Ive had subscriptions to Claude and Gemini since December and had a couple of months of Chatgpt but have cancelled that. As an all-rounder I'm extremely happy with Opus 5.5. If you had a narrower use case i suspect you can get more/cheaper from a chinese API.

Anthropic subscription, no question. Although the best bang for the buck I'd the 90 EUR a month thing. (I suppose it may cost $100).

Sonnet

Gemini Pro IMO

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