I've only been using free tokens for a year now. Gemini and they just dropped pro so I switched to minimax. Bit of a hurdle switching from Gemini-cli to kilo-cli, but now I can't really see too much difference.

If I was starting new projects I'd pay for a better model, but honestly I don't really know any different.

I've not ever used Claude and people seem to rave about it. Maybe its good, but I doubt its $200/month good.

When I hit issues with these lower models I think hard about creating the right tooling - agnostic to the harness and I feel like maybe its more work but I can carry those tools to any setup going forward. That's how it was in the early Linux days so why change what clearly works?