Yeah that's a good idea. I played around with kimi2.5/gemini in a similar way and it's solid for the price. It would be pretty easy to build some skills out and delegate heavy lifting to better models without managing it yourself I think. This has all been driven by anthropic's shenanigans (I cancelled my max sub after almost a year both because of the opencode thing and them consistently nerfing everything for weeks to keep up the arms race.)

Cancelled my Anthropic subscription this week after about 18 months of membership. Usage limits have dropped drastically (or token usage have increased) to the point where it's unusable.

Codex + Z.ai combined is the same price, has far higher usage limits and just as good.

Yeah I did the same (cancel Anthropic). Mainly because the buggy/bloatiness of their tooling pissed me off and I got annoyed by Dario's public pronouncements (not that SamA is any better).

I ended up impressed enough w/ GPT 5.3 that I did the $200 for this month, but only because I can probably write-off as business expense in next year's accounting.

Next month I'll probably do what I just said: $20 each to OpenAI and Google for GPT 5.3 and Gemini 3 [only because it gets me drive and photo storage], buy the z.AI plan, and only use GPT for nitty gritty analysis heavy work and review and GLM for everything else.