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Comment by jpardoe | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Pi and it was great but I had to switch back to Claude Code purely for the subscription. Even with all the token efficiency I built into Pi it just wasn't nearly as good value as an Anthropic subscription. All open models ended up being more expensive so I switched to using an OpenAI subscription, which was better, but the OpenAI subscription is way less generous AND their models are behind. It became hard to justify.

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Sorry, what on earth are you doing where the open models are more expensive than the subs?

When I was using anthropic subs, my "equivalent usage" was $6k/month.

On the open models (specifically deepseek flash), it's < $100/month.

Same work, maybe more.

> When I was using anthropic subs, my "equivalent usage" was $6k/month.

Exactly, yeah. The subscriptions are insanely generous and far better value than open models.

No, my point is I can get the same work done paying < $100/month with the open models.

I don’t think you can.

You'd be surprised what you can accomplish if you don't just let the agents go wild.

The large open models (GLM-5.3, Kimi3, etc) are far more expensive than their large closed equivalents (Opus, Sol), because the closed models are far more subsidized when using subscriptions.

If you see no difference at all in between Opus and Deepseek Flash for your work, that is great! Personally, I found the latter to be unusable for the projects I was working on.

Can you describe what you are doing where comparing the two is problematic?

For what it's worth, I use DS flash for statistical analysis, design (C++, Python), scripting, server maintenance. The same I used for Opus.

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