deepseek pro and flash are dirt cheap.

kimi-k2.6 can do a pretty damn good job with vision for optimizing ui design workloads in a loop. not cheap but significantly cheaper than anthropic.

mimo 3 is jsut pretty damn good when you need a high end reasoning model - also reletivly affordable.

I was able to run gemma and do some coding locally on a 32 gb machine. it was slow as molasses but the fact that it worked at all on a local machine that wasn't desinged around AI workloads is great.

Its only a tokenpocalypse if you rely on these closed and frankly overpriced american models. is opus better than kimik2.6? arguably yes but not 16 times better from what I've been seeing.