This is embarrassing but I find 5.4-mini on Low covers a substantial part of my and my colleagues work.

Back when it became expensive I learned to live with it and I find my "AI skills" (mainly communication) have a substantial impact on the efficiency of the model. Not saying my work is difficult, it's not, but I find there is quite a bit of wiggle room. Smaller models can still perform useful work, but you have to do the heavy lifting yourself. It saves a ton of money.

I used to burn through 75% of my tokens in an hour or two. Now I can work all day and hit maybe 50-60% if I use it heavily.