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

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

#181

Post by lelanthran »

gruez wrote: post #116
lelanthran wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I easily get $1K+ of usage out of my $100 max sub. And that's with Opus 4.6 on high thinking. And people keep claiming the token providers are running inference at a profit.

>And people keep claiming the token providers are running inference at a profit. Not everyone gets $1K of usage, and you don't know how fat the per-token margins are. It's like saying the local buffet place is losing money because you eat $100 worth of takeout for $30.

> Not everyone gets $1K of usage, and you don't know how fat the per-token margins are.

Well, we're going to find out sooner rather than later. Right now you don't know how thin (or negative) the margins are, either, after all.

All we know for certain is how much VC cash they got. Revenue, spend, profit, etc calculated according to GAAP are still a secret.

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

#183

Post by phainopepla2 »

pyinstallwoes wrote: post #140
BoredPositron wrote: post #139

Get a Gemini subscription and pipe the antigravity tokens into claude code. You can have five family accounts on one subscription and every account gets the same amount of tokens. It's the best value there is atm and you get more claude tokens than from anthropic themselves.

Sorry can you expand on that? I have a Gemini subscription from a Google pro account but never used it much. I can use it with Claude Code?? Hmm. I’ll look it up. Thanks!

Be aware it's against the terms of service. Google account ban is possible

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

#184

Post by Syzygies »

i_love_retros wrote: post #16

I can't believe people are spending $100 a month on this! You're all mad!

Hearing my "before I die" math and code ambitions, a psychiatrist friend tried to convince me to hire a full-time programming assistant. Then came AI.

Money is relative. I retired at less than the average professor salary (all ages) at a not-rich school. I would have made more in tech. I still have weeks where the market goes up 2000x my AI budget, just the retirement savings from my salary. Anyone who isn't living in a van and eating peanut butter if they must, to save the max toward retirement, isn't recognizing how profoundly our system is rigged to favor saving.

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

#185

Post by alexjplant »

extr wrote: post #109

I think you are kidding if you think you are going to be remotely approximately the quantity/quality of output you get from a $100/max sub with Zed/Openrouter. I easily get $1K+ of usage out of my $100 max sub. And that's with Opus 4.6 on high thinking.

For personal use I've noticed Claude (via the web-based chat UI) making really bizarre mistakes lately like ignoring input or making completely random assumptions. At work Claude Code has turned into an absolute dog. It fails to follow instructions and builds stuff like a lazy junior developer without any architecture, tests, or verification. This is even with max effort, Opus 4.6, multiple agents, early compaction, etc. I don't know what they did but Anthropic's quality lead has basically evaporated for me. I hope they fix it because I've since adapted my project's Claude artifacts for use with Codex and started using it instead - it feels like Claude Code did earlier this year.

I'd like to give the new GLM models a try for personal stuff.

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

#186

Post by giancarlostoro »

kisamoto wrote: post #3
hhthrowaway1230 wrote: post #2

note: doesn't openrouter charge 5.5% fee?

You are absolutely correct, I was not aware of this. I will update the article accordingly and perhaps it's more worthwhile to stay solely on Cursor with the limited models. Sadly Zed seems to add 10% so it's still more worthwhile to use OpenRouter.

Look again, they don't charge that fee until after "1M requests per month" whatever that means? Oh that's if you bring your own provider keys.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/byok

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

#187

Post by blitzar »

andai wrote: post #146
blitzar wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend The new gimped claude code limits means my claude code spend the last month is $131. It cost me $20. I did an additional spend $5 on extra usage which cost me $5. While VC's are setting fire to money I am going to warm my hands.

You mean you were getting more than $130 per $20 before? 85% discount is actually a bit lower than I remember. I think it used to be closer to 90-95%. They're getting stingy ;)

I think it was around $400-$500 last year ($20 a day was fairly common) before they added the 7 day limits (and have since slashed the 4 hour limits).

No parallel running; I would very consistently get tokens for over 3 hours then take a walk around the block and come back and be ready to go again.

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

#189

Post by recursivegirth »

ElFitz wrote: post #15

Has anyone (other than OpenClaw) used pi? ( https://shittycodingagent.ai/ , https://pi.dev/ ) Any insights / suggestions / best practices?

I bought a $30 Z.ai Coding Plan sub to go with it. 7 million tokens has only gone through 2% of my weekly usage using the GLM-5.1 model. I am pretty happy.

I am only doing single project workflows, but with Z.ai I feel like it opens a whole new door to parallel workflows without hitting usage limits.

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

#190

Post by tecoholic »

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…

I agree. One of the strangest things I found was “in-built” support for a things like TailwindCSS. The LSP starts showing warning in all HTML/TSX files and confuses me to no end. I know, I can turn it off with the setting, but the choice seems so confusing. Tailwind is just one of the thousands of CSS libraries. Why enable it without any mention in the codebase.

I have actually ditched PyCharm for the snappiness of Zed. But the paper cuts are really adding up.

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