If both of them are down at the same time, I would switch to my Kimi or GLM subscription and keep working. If they fail too, I switch to any number of providers via OpenRouter.

While there is some lock-in for the hardest tasks, for most of what people do LLMs are rapidly becoming a commodity.

In fact, right this minute I have Opus benchmarking Kimi alongside itself to determine which workflows we'll switch to using Kimi by default and Opus as the fallback instead of vice versa. It has already conceded Kimi does better on several tasks.

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ulimn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

To me it doesn't sound so "economically convenient" to pay extra usage to alternative providers while someone pays 20/100/200 dollars for their service.

	▲	vidarh 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The subs for those alternative providers have similar tiering but more generous token allocations than Anthropic and OpenAI, and deliver good enough quality to be worth it. If I needed to fall back on OpenRouter, it'd be paid per token, of course, but that'd take 4 major providers being down, in which case I suspect I'll have more critical things to worry about. As it is, I use more than I could with a single $200 Claude Max subscription anyway, so I distribute my tasks across multiple providers. Even without that it's cheap insurance given the cost of lost time.

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rokkamokka an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You... wouldn't just code yourself if they were down?

	▲	danielbln 23 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If my laptop breaks I'm not going back to pen and paper, I'm buying a new/different laptop.
	▲	vidarh 38 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		No more than when they are up, no. Why would I? I can produce far more by having tasks running in the background while I do other work.