I personally use opencode so I can swap between models and try different options. I'd say I prefer claude (fable and opus 4.8) so far, but curious to see where gpt 5.6 lands.

For personal stuff, I've been pretty happy with chatgpt's $20 plan. I believe it has considerably higher limits than claude's $20 plan, and it's enough for the personal stuff I play with (hermes, and some small coding stuff). Also allows me to keep up to date on openai models.

The $20 GPT plan with GPT 5.5 lasted me, somehow, exactly one smallish fixup feature