For serious work, the difference between spending $10/month and $100/month is not even worth considering for most professional developers. There are exceptions like students and people in very low income countries, but I’m always confused by developers with in careers where six figure salaries are normal who are going cheap on tools.

I find even the SOTA models to be far away from trustworthy for anything beyond throwaway tasks. Supervising a less-than-SOTA model to save $10 to $100 per month is not attractive to me in the least.

I have been experimenting with self hosted models for smaller throwaway tasks a lot. It’s fun, but I’m not going to waste my time with it for the real work.

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zozbot234 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You need to supervise the model anyway, because you want that code to be long-term maintainable and defect free, and AI is nowhere near strong enough to guarantee that anytime soon. Using the latest Opus for literally everything is just a huge waste of effort.

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senordevnyc 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, but I find supervision much easier and faster with a strong model. It makes fewer dumb mistakes that I have to catch and correct, and it’ll follow my instructions more reliably.

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dandaka 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Waste of effort... of Opus? If "Opus effort" is cheaper, than dev hours managing yourself more dumb/effective model, what is the point?

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cyanydeez 6 hours ago | parent [-]

rich people dont concern themselves with the cost of tokens.

	▲	dnnddidiej 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It is not even rich. If you earn more than $30k it is worth your employer spending $3k on AI tools.

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slopinthebag 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

$100 / month will get you rate limited to much to rely on with the Claude plans. People still report getting rate limited on the $200 / plan.

Also not everyone wants to use Claude Code, so if they're paying API pricing it's more likely thousands of dollars a month. If you can get the same results by spending a fraction of that, why wouldn't you?

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AnonymousPlanet 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For actually serious work, it's a stark difference if your proprietary and security relevant code is sent abroad to a foreign, possibly future hostile country, or is sent to some data center around the corner. It doesn't even need to be defence related.

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flatline 6 hours ago | parent [-]

AFAIK all these companies have SOTA or near-SOTA models available under enterprise licenses. AI companies are not interested in your secret sauce, they are trying to capture the SDLC wholesale.

	▲	hedora 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m not sure what you are implying by “enterprise license”, but if you think it provides any meaningful protection against malicious US government actors, you really need to read and internalize the US CLOUD Act. On a related note, I really need to try some local models (probably starting with qwen), since, at least in 2026, the Chinese models are way better at protecting democracy and free speech than the US models.
	▲	dnnddidiej an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That doesn't address the concern. Google isn't interested in violating 1st and 4th amendment rights of people who criticize the government... but they do anyway (or more correctly assist the government in doing so).
	▲	AnonymousPlanet 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If an American company, let's say a company that writes software for power stations, would use the services of a French or Chinese AI company under such enterprise licenses, how long would you think it would take until someone, in Congress e.g., would interfere? What if they learned that half of the American small and medium sized companies would have started pouring all their business information into such a service?