Curious: On which plan? In my experience, their $20 plan is super inadequate as a daily driver (ditto for Qwen's $30/mo), though given K3, I'm tempted to trial $49/mo or $99/mo.

I just pay metered usage via OpenRouter. I've spent no more than $10-$20/mo, but my usage is, by the standards of so-called "agentic coding" these days, very light and confined.

I doubt my workflows match the profile of "daily driver" as you're conceiving of it. I'm mostly in the IDE chat box asking for a hand here and there, but no "long horizon" / big vision / architecture things. Occasionally, I'll solicit a general opinion, quite abstractly, which isn't very token-intensive. My contexts are tiny and I aim to keep them that way.

The only token-intensive thing I do is occasional analyses of open-source codebases along the lines of "what is the actual behaviour when message X comes in and is malformed like this?", or something else similarly far-reaching. For that, I use DeepSeek's Reasonix, which they savvily dropped at the exact moment the sting of Claude API pricing became a sensation. It's a very cache-oriented harness, and delivers on its promise of being very economical. I doubt I've spent more than $10 with DeepSeek over the months I've used it. When I want a harness to inhale a codebase and give me an answer, Reasonix has been the go-to for a while now, and it's great. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is enough for many simple things, though I just run it on DeepSeek-V4-Pro because it's so cheap that I don't care.