OpenRouter lets you pay by the token only (no subscription), has all the frontier models (including Opus 4.7, GPT-5.5) and most of the others, and if you use it sparingly it usually turns out to be quite cheap.

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tasuki a minute ago | parent | next [-]

My problem with pay-by-the-token is that it discourages me using the thing ("oh the prompt will cost me $0.1"), so I pay a subscription which I'm pretty sure costs me about two-three times what I'd pay just for the api costs, but encourages me to use it more ("oh I have a subscription already, better make use of it").

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johndough an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

API pricing for Claude is about an order of magnitude more expensive than subscriptions (numbers: https://she-llac.com/claude-limits). But it may be worth it with DeepSeek V4 Pro, which is currently on discount.

	▲	bambax an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Depends very much on usage! If you connect it to tools like Cursor, etc. then yes a subscription is probably cheaper -- although, you'd have to subscribe to each provider if you want to use them all. But if you ask questions occasionally, (and don't resend, for example, your whole codebase with each request), then the API feels really cheap, even for the frontier models.