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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

#231

Post by kisamoto »

slimebot80 wrote: post #229

I might be misunderstanding something. He uses $70 for remaining credit and says that's a good thing because it rolls over But spending $70 on an API (he says he still prefers Opus) is far less cost effective than a Max plan on Anthropic. The article seems to be nudging us to setup OpenRouter but the premise isn't fully true. A bit of diversity is excellent, but the costs are going to (largely) prohibit it in reality…

OP here. I do like Opus but I don't default to it for everything. My CC usage is a lot of Haiku/Sonnet and is also very bursty (bursts throughout the month, not a day).

I find that a lot of my Claude usage goes unused and then when I'm coding or leaning on agents I hit a limit and have to wait. I don't like that dynamic. I do have Extra Usage enabled (with a cap) but then I'm spending more than the $100 I already do.

I'm learning that a lot of people seem to consistently stay within limits and that works for them but I was looking for something different for myself.

The real pain is that Anthropic don't easily quantify usage (which can now change over the day). How many tokens is it? Minimum? Maximum? I tried to quantify this with OpenTelemetry for a while but have decided to move to this more flexible setup.

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

#232

Post by cjonas »

BeetleB wrote: post #101
therealpygon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best. Fo…

The two things I like about OpenRouter: 1. The LLM provider doesn't know it's you (unless you have personally identifiable information in your queries). If N people are accessing GPT-5.x using OpenRouter, OpenAI can't distinguish the people. It doesn't know if 1 person made all those requests, or N. 2. The ability to ensure your traffic is routed only to providers that claim not to log your inputs (not even for secur…

Wouldn't they be using the Azure inference API or AWS bedrock on their own accounts and NOT be going through the openAI/Anthropics servers anyways? I just always assumed this is how the big inference "resellers" (openrouter, cursor, etc) were operating.

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

#233

Post by mark212 »

Bizarre and baffling -- an entire post about AI agents for coding and not a single mention of OpenAI, Codex, or ChatGPT (any model). Not that I'm shilling for them in any way, but the consensus among Twitterati is that Codex is better and it's weird that it's not even mentioned as an option?

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

#234

Post by aryehof »

chatmasta wrote: post #213
hayd wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

had been using claude max/opus with pi and the results have been incredible. Having pi write an AGENTS.md and dip your feet into creating your own skills specific to the project. With the anthropic billing change (not being able to use the max credits for pi) I think I have to cancel - as I'm whirring through credits now. Going to move to the $250/mo OpenAI codex plan for now.

Regardless of which harness you use, asking your agent to self-edit its own .claude (and to put it in the repo itself so you see the changes) is the single biggest impact change you can make in terms of compounding improvement. Couple this with telling it to create skills for /garden (clean up drift based on what changed this session), /handoff (garden, create ant skills to resolve friction encountered this session,…

Can you provide more details on these skills?

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

#236

Post by sandos »

neya wrote: post #33
cbg0 wrote: post #19

I don't think there's currently better value than Github's $40 plan which gives you access to GPT5 & Claude variants. It's pay per request so not ideal for back-and-forth but great for building complex features on the cheap compared to paying per token. Because GH is accessing the API behind the scenes, you should face less degradation when using Sonnet/Opus models compared to a Claude subscription. Keep a ChatGPT $2…

Is your source code worth only $40 for them to train their models on? https://www.techradar.com/pro/bad-news-skeptics-github-says-...

This is of course not a problem for business accounts.

We are not allowed to use anything other than our company provided GHCP credentials due to the data retention clause in our contracts. Ie. they are not allowed to use our data.

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

#238

Post by sandos »

vanillameow wrote: post #37
Computer0 wrote: post #4

When I use the tool ccusage it says I use $600 of usage a month for my $100. I don’t know that this is a good value proposition for me if I want to stay with the same model, half the reason I use Claude code, personally.

I ran this just now and for a small web-app I built I used over $50 in a single day. This was using superpowers plugin and almost exclusively coordinating through Opus. Could I get by with 100$ a month without the subscription? Maybe, but I pay for the convenience of just being able to throw Opus with lavish plugins at it (with 5h limits that are, in my opinion, pretty reasonable). I don't really WANT to have to thin…

I dont understand how CC can burn that much money. Iv'e built many webapps using copilot, and our normal business tokens rarely run out. I would say Ive never exceeded 150% of a normal months tokens.

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

#239

Post by [deleted] »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #155

I just so happen to be doing a price comparison for different cloud LLM providers right now. It turns out some of the cheapest providers with the highest limits are ones you might not have heard of. OpenCode Go has the simplest plan at the highest rate limits for any subscription plan with multiple model families, and it's $10/month ($5/month for first month). With the cheapest model in the plan (MiniMax M2.5), it is…

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