I don't agree with the people who say that frontier models are "overkill"; sure, they may be expensive (API usage especially), but the subscription plans are fair for the insane value they provide. I have a session where, if I had to pay for API usage, I would have paid close to $300.

= I had a lower‑tier model that I couldn't trust to make things happen for me; I somehow got the intuitive feel of what it could and couldn't do, so I use the "frontier" models for those tasks—things that include complex AI integration, weird responsiveness edge cases, or just when I find myself begging the lower‑tier models to just fix something again and again.