Ask HN: $50 monthly budget, which coding models would you recommend now?

You can swicth to Sonnet 4.6. It is even an fantastic model for coding, without changing you subscription. Here the 5 hours window limit is much more larger, if using it with specific tasks.

If you want to change the LLM, my advice is Kimi K2 that's much more chip and very skilled for coding.

(you are right: Opus is a very token-consuming even in my experience, but often it is over-skilled and you don't need it)

Get a few GitHub Copilot accounts at 10 bucks each and use OpenAI models, they have very high usage limits I honestly struggle to even hit with one 10 dollar subscription.

I would keep Claude code for the heavy lifting and then opencode zen (10usd) with Kimi k2.5 for the rest.

GitHub Copilot Pro plus gives you access to many models and if you use them a lot, Microsoft loses money (though they can brag about one more active user and get your data).

It doesn’t give you the largest context windows, but most models perform poorly when the context is very big so it’s not a dealbreaker to me.

It's all over Chinese Taobao. biggest catch would be that all of the sutff is in Chinese, they have an international version in english but if you run into issues and have to talk to the seller, 99% of them don't speak Chinese but with AI translation that won't be a problem. you can even get Claude Code shared plan there as well, what they do is to buy the MAX plan and then have a couple people sharing it, which on average still beats your $20 Pro plan's allowance.

You can also add Google’s AntiGravity into the bunch. They have free allowances of Claude and Gemini 3.1 Pro there ready right after install & login. & you can also get cheap Google AI Pro shared plans there as well, just to get higher allowance on all these models.

There are many ways to get around the session limit, gotta be creative. Update: Windsurf has just made a shitty move by changing their pricing structure from credits to rolling window percentages, not sure if it's better or worse, free models are still there & I haven't hit any rate limit so far.