Also try a hundred bucks on Openrouter and experiment with the Chinese models like Deepseek, Kimi, GLM. $100 will last a good while, and it isn't tied to a single model or provider.

I burned though $50 on OpenRouter in three days, this is with selective model routing based on tasks/strict AGENTS.md. A Claude 20x sub running Sonnet 5/Opus 5 and light Fable usage gets me through the month. It wasn't even close even though I wish it were.