Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

Post by Deathmax » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #115

napoleond wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't know if 1 person made all those requests, or N. FWIW this is highly unlikely to be true. It's true that the upstream provider won't know it's _you_ per se, but most LLM providers strongly encourage proxies like OpenRouter to distinguish between downstream clients for security and performance reasons. For example: - https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/safety-best-pr... - https://developers.opena…

Fair point. Would be good to hear from OpenRouter folks on how they handle the safety identifier. For prompt caching, they already say they permit it, and do not consider it "logging" (i.e. if you have zero retention turned on, it will still go to providers who do prompt caching).

Post by andrewmcwatters » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 4:45 PM UTC

numlocked wrote: post #14

Computer0 wrote: post #5

I have had credits on open router that haven’t been deleted since near the projects launch, I believe 365 days is not a rule but rather a right reserved.

COO of OpenRouter here. Thats right — we haven’t done it to date but we can’t have unlimited liabilities stacking up forever. At some point we will start expiring credits from accounts that have seen zero activity in over a year.

Post by BeetleB » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

Deathmax wrote: post #121

BeetleB wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. Would be good to hear from OpenRouter folks on how they handle the safety identifier. For prompt caching, they already say they permit it, and do not consider it "logging" (i.e. if you have zero retention turned on, it will still go to providers who do prompt caching).

OpenRouter tells you if they submit with your user ID or anonymously if you hover over one of the icons on the provider, eg OpenAI has "OpenRouter submits API requests to this provider with an anonymous user ID.", Azure OpenAI on the other hand has "OpenRouter submits API requests to this provider anonymously.".

Post by msh » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 4:53 PM UTC

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #90

criley2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried $20 claude code recently, but I've used OpenCode Zen primarily so I can play with opensource/chinese models which are very inexpensive. I'd spend $0.50-$1.00 on a single claude opus 4.6 plan mode run, then have a chinese model execute the plan for like $0.10-$0.15 total. I'd keep context short, constantly start new threads, and get laser focused markdown plans and knowledgebase to be token efficient.…

Which chinese models do you use and do you use any for specific tasks?

Post by udkl » Thu, Apr 09, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

supernes wrote: post #22

On the topic of Zed itself as a VSCode replacement - my experience is mixed. I loved it at first, but with time the papercuts add up. The responsiveness difference isn't that big on my system, but Zed's memory usage (with the TS language server in particular) is scandalous. As far as DX goes it's probably at 85% of the level VSCode provides, but in this space QoL features matter a lot. Oh, and it still can't render e…