> Open models like GLM 5.2 are getting good enough to handle 90% of tasks, and will eat most of their usage unless they start serving it at cost.

Most people either don’t have the money to buy hardware to run open models and/or don’t have the utilisation to make renting cost effective.

https://openrouter.ai/models

you can use these in hermes, cursor, openclaw, opencode, etc with 2 lines of config that claude code will happily do for you if you ask

GLM 5.2, deepseek 4 Flash and the newly released Hy3 are Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6 level models at a tiny fraction of the cost.

I'm on the $200 claude plan and blew through my weekly limits with Fable in a day, then ended up wasting $20 with opus 4.8 overages in an hour to finish out work in active sessions. Since then I've been using GLM 5.2 with openrouter + opencode and am spending less than $5/day for equivalent output.

GLM 5.2 is monstrous in size, no one is running that on their own hardware.

But it's a very competitively priced model other providers can offer (since it's open) so it's a much cheaper alternative than claude in practice.

I assume that is what they meant.

Fortunately, multiple model providers are offering open weights models at significantly lower prices than closed models.

This is where I’m at. While I’d LOVE to have a powerful near-frontier model at home, I don’t have the extra funds necessary to purchase a tricked-out Mac Studio…and if I did, I’d pay off debts.