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In practice all of these open models are more expensive than a Claude subscription.

Are they? (genuine question, i've got no experience with Claude) This month I used 1 billion tokens (including cache) with DS4.1 flash and it cost me 7% of my $10 opencode go sub.

If you meant in developer time, then I don't know but it seems very fast to me (rarely thinks more than ~10sec, never more than ~30sec) and usually oneshots what I prompt it to do. I use opencode tui as harness.

In my experience yes. Been using Claude since day one and wanted to experiment with Pi for fun, and try to get my costs down. I found the open models more expensive, eventually had to plug my Pi set up into an OpenAI subscription, that was the only way to get good value… Then I realised OpenAI is way behind Opus 5.5 and their subscription is far less generous with usage, so I’ve come full circle and am back on Claude Code.

i found they were until recently. mimo 2.6 flash and glm 5.3 flash seem to finally be cheaper. i find ds4.1 flash still on the high side.

I found GLM Flash competitive price wise but then my tasks took twice as long to complete. Even if it was cheaper (in my experience it still wasn’t) you then lose out on speed because of the insane amounts of inefficient reasoning.

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