In my experience, it is claude-code paired with deepseek-v4. For penny-pinchers like me, I can have long coding sessions with it with no anxiety about the cost. Also, prompting it to what you want and verifying the outputs is more important than the quality of the model. So, I am better off with a cheaper model and taking the responsibility for prompting it and verifying the results.

It's obviously much cheaper paying by the token but how does it compare to a codex subscription on cost?

Can you quantify the actual costs in a week and the use you make?