I've found the regular Claude Pro subscription quite enough for coding tasks when you anyway have a bunch of other things like code reviews to do in addition to coding, and won't spend the whole day running it.

Yeah I was using openrouter for Claude code and burned through $30 in credits to do things that if I had just used the openrouter chat for it would have been like $1.50, I decided it was better for now to do the extra “secretary work” of manual entry and context management of the chat and pain of attaching files. It was pretty disappointing because at first I had assumed it would not be much different in price at all.

This is an interesting way to look at it because you can kind of quantify the tradeoff in terms of the value of your time. A simple analysis would be something like, if you value your time at $60/hour, then spending an additional $30 in credits becomes a good choice if it saves you more than a half-hour of work.

Try what I've done: use the Claude Code tool but point your ANTHROPIC_URL at a DeepSeek API membership. It's like 1/10th the cost, and about 2/3rds the intelligence.

Sometimes I can't really tell.

Also there is a fixed price Claude Code plan for GLM 4.6 from z.ai, I pay for the cheapest ($6/mo) as an alternate/fallback for Claude Code and Codex. I've been surprised by how similar in capabilities all three of them are, definitely not seeing a big CLI agent moat...

GLM is maybe slightly weaker on average but on the other hand it's also solved problems where both CC and Codex got stuck in endless failure loops so for the price it's nice to have in my back pocket. I also see some tool use failures sometimes that it always works around which I'm guessing are due to slight differences with Claude.

https://z.ai/subscribe

I use this to proxy ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to other models: https://github.com/ujisati/claude-code-provider-proxy

unfortunately it doesn't support local models but they're too slow for coding anyway.

I've used that too, but in DeepSeek's case they provide an Anthropic API compatible endpoint so you don't have to.

Or a 3rd party service like https://synthetic.new, of which I am an unaffiliated user.

So, Deepseek 3.1 from their own platform:

Input $0.28 / 1M tokens cache miss Output $0.42 / 1M tokens

Via synthetic (which otherwise looks cool):

Input $0.56/mtok Output $1.68/mtok

So 2-3 better value through https://platform.deepseek.com

(Granted Synthetic gives you way more models to choose from, including ones that don't parrot CPC/PLA propaganda and censor)

I'm using CC + GLM 4.6 from Synthetic and results are top notch for $60/mo, speed is fast and servers are close to home than z.ai