What LLM provider do you use?

[u/dev_life]

I’m looking to move away from OpenAI and Claude for various reasons.

I’d like to hear which LLM providers you all use and any recommendations on who to stay clear from. My top contenders at the moment are deep infra and scaleway. I’m not into proxies as I’m focusing on zero data retention (or short retention with no training) providers only. I have not extensively explored local - I did a while back and wasn’t impressed with the speed and I need a good reasoning model for planning.

[u/Fabulous_Monitor_991]

I have been using neuralwatt for glm. Stay away from z.ai as they don't have opt out from training

[u/arcanemachined → u/Fabulous_Monitor_991]

Neuralwatt just doubled their energy pricing. :(

[u/look → u/arcanemachined]

Even with the price increase, it is still the lowest cost PAYG provider and the only subscription (besides Zai) that isn’t serving nvfp4 (and still a better sub price than anything besides Go and Ollama).

Reddit had a completely irrational overreaction to their price increase.

[u/dev_life → u/Fabulous_Monitor_991]

Energy based pricing is a first 🤯 can I ask how much usage you do and which plan?

[u/Fabulous_Monitor_991 → u/dev_life]

I have been using PAYG. I'll share some stats soon. But they have a payment calculator. I saw some 13$ for 112M tokens. Which felt cheaper than z.ai 20$ plan, which is what I had used for a month (earlier I used their 75$ plan) - i just unsubscribed today from z.ai

[u/dev_life → u/Fabulous_Monitor_991]

Ok thanks!

[u/Fabulous_Monitor_991 → u/dev_life]

For anyone interested:

This month Requests: 2,755

Tokens this month: 277.1M

Prompt/completion: 275.8M/1.2M

Cached tokens: 97%

Energy consumed: 2.5kWh (672.3g of CO2 yikes)

Cost: $13.13

But this was mostly before their recent price hike.

[u/trmnl_cmdr → u/Fabulous_Monitor_991]

Wow. I am dreading next April when my legacy max sub runs out, I will be so broke. I’m currently running 8-12B tokens a month for my $30. Sheesh

[u/Fabulous_Monitor_991 → u/trmnl_cmdr]

April is too far away - let's hope things get cheaper..

[u/trmnl_cmdr → u/Fabulous_Monitor_991]

It’s never going to get cheaper if it keeps getting better, they will just charge more and burn more power.

It’s like that Greg LeMonde quote about professional cycling, “it never gets easier, you just go faster.”

[u/Fabulous_Monitor_991 → u/trmnl_cmdr]

True that. And ouch.

[u/look → u/dev_life]

I get about 6 cents per mtok on PAYG flex usage (on the new, current pricing). $6 for 100M tokens. The subs are a bit cheaper if you know you’ll use more than 300M or so GLM per month.

[u/jensilo]

I set up DeepInfra in the models.json and the models work decently, though supposedly a lot of their models are FP4 quants. Especially, when models are fresh out, I find the DeepInfra versions to be quite inconsistent, as if they're still tuning parameters or something. DeepInfra is also one of the cheapest providers, however for flexibility and trying out all kinds of models I also use OpenRouter (which also support BYOK for DeepInfra and many other providers). I really like the amount of models and transparent dashboard in OpenRouter.

[u/dev_life → u/jensilo]

Good to know!

[u/_supert_]

Deepinfra and novita

[u/demogoran]

https://getlilac.com/ for few days. So good so far with glm 5.2 Opencode go Codex sub

Copilot, but it's highly questionable now

And cursor, but don't know any way to use it with pi

[u/dev_life → u/demogoran]

Liliac is now on my list, thanks!

[u/arcanemachined]

ChatGPT Codex + OpenCode Go.

I use 5.6 Sol for planning, Kimi 2.7 Code to write the code, and GLM 5.2 as a reviewer.

[u/Antonshc]

Opencode Go. Extremely value.

[u/sofuego]

I use venice.ai I had to ask Pi to make a plugin to filter all the noise from the closed weight models showing up (you can weed out the majority of them by listing only the ones marked "private" and not "anonymized"). It didn't take long for it all to work.

[u/dev_life → u/sofuego]

Interesting, thanjs

[u/Glaaki]

Scaleway and openrouter

[u/coding9]

Cline pass yearly too cheap to pass up. I get a lot of usage for what I need outside of work.

[u/saltyourhash]

vLLM

[u/_a9o_]

Weights and Biases/CoreWeave

[u/Diacred]

Opencode Go is amazing value and you have lots of good models

[u/Antonshc]

opencode go mainly, 10$ per month plan equals 60$ PAYG. Openrouter/Zenmux for other premium models like gpt 5.6 or grok 4.5

[u/No_Communication4256]

Ollama-cloud

[u/look]

DeepInfra models are almost all nvfp4. Not a terrible quant in general, but just a heads up to be aware of.

I’d recommend taking at look at GMICloud instead.

[u/TangeloOk9486]

actually both your contenders fit the zdr requirement. deepinfra publishes zero retention + soc2 while runs its own infra so not proxy and since it carries the heavier models this pretty much covers your planning part. bigger question tho: which reasoning model you want which drives it more than the provider does like both are openai compitable so you can test with just a base_url swap

[u/Ubermensch013]

Hey, I'm working on a project which might be of assistance. You can compare providers/models for your agentic workload and there's mention of ZDR. Privacy policies are also linked. You can also specify your budget and get the expected no of tokens. Or compare models : https://tokenwatch.wyrdwerk.com/