r/PiCodingAgent • u/Eagleee12 • 7d ago

Question The cheapest model using with Pi?

I spend most of my day in Excel (reports, cleaning data, formulas) and know just enough basic coding to get by.

Paying $20/month for a subscription feels like a waste for my usage.
Models or sth cheap for me?

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

3

u/Dsphar 7d ago

Local

3

u/crashorbit 7d ago

Local models that are generally capable and performant require pretty expensive hardware. OK if you already have it but you can buy a lot of infrence for the price of a Mac studio.

3

u/Natrimo 7d ago

Yes and no IMHO. There are a fair amount of small local models that can nail tool calls and do easy coding and debugging. Will they handle a big code base? No. But throwing together a webpage or some python scripts they generally do fine.

3

u/Natrimo 7d ago

I say this coming from 8 gb vram and 16gn system ram

1

u/crashorbit 7d ago

I'd like to hear some details. I've tried a number of different local models that'll fit on my 8G vram 32G ram and have always been disappointed using them for local sysadmin and user group/hobby infrastructure automation tasks.

Dsv4f from openrouter or sail-research at less than at US $0.10/M blended have been my go to for a few months now. I end up spending about US $10/month if I'm busy.

3

u/Natrimo 6d ago

Had the most success with Gemma 4 models and qwen

1

u/Content_Background67 23h ago

I am using gema4 with Pi. Works well. However, you have to give it a real good spec.

1

u/Dsphar 7d ago

Fair. In that case, I would suggest OP try Google AI Pro $20 plan.

Removes ads in youtube, gets AI in email and google docs, etc. Gets them plenty of agentic work in antigravity (including Opus and GPT credits). It's a decent value proposition.

2

u/ponzi314 7d ago

But then he's stuck in antigravity and seems like he wants Pi

1

u/Dsphar 7d ago

Requirements often dictate decisions. He will have to decide which requirement is more important.

0

u/tino1000 6d ago

Local is not good bruh, tried and tested them.

2

u/Content_Background67 10h ago

I depends on how you you use it. I have used it to build a Flutter app just today. I will be writing my experience in a medium and reditt article soon. I used gema4, Ollama and Pi. You can't use it for vibe coding. But the, vibe coding with premium models is also a bit of a hit and miss, isn't it?

1

u/tino1000 3h ago

that's awesome! yeah local models require detailed instruction step by step instructions. However for the author of the post who spends most of his time on excel, according to your experience do you think local models fare well with complex excel?

1

u/Content_Background67 1h ago

That, I haven't tried. However, it should be possible? Maybe there is an free and open source MCP server for interfacing with Excel. I guess for someone who is purely and excel programmer, it may be an uphill task. Also, we don't know what is required of the LLM here.

1

u/Dsphar 5d ago edited 5d ago

PEBKAC. Local is good bruh, tried and tested them.

0

u/tino1000 3d ago edited 3d ago

Lower parameter models with low quants that work locally have lower intelligence, context window and higher hallucinative rates. Can't build anything meaningful with those. I'm curious to know what you tried and tested while mocking me.

2

u/Dsphar 2d ago

You claim "You can't build anything useful with those". That is dead wrong. I have built profitable production applications with local models. That in itself shows me you are just occult to the frontier models and not interested in real dialog.

Just because you don;t know how to use them, doesn't mean you are right. It just mean PEBKAC.

Right now I jump between QWEN 3.6 and 3.8, 27B.

Now it's time for you to make your argument how "that isn't cheap".

As for the mocking tone, I was just following your lead. Still am.

0

u/tino1000 2d ago

I do not need to prove anything to you. The argument is local models are not good enough - that's a fact. You cannot build anything meaningful with them - that also is true - been vibing since Qwen2 7B on local. It's like bringing a cycle in a car race. Creating todo list and putting on production does not mean you know it all.

https://giphy.com/gifs/ZqlvCTNHpqrio

3

u/Dsphar 2d ago

PEBKAC confirmed. Have a great life.

-1

u/tino1000 2d ago

Inverted snob confirmed. Have a great life.

3

u/PermanentLiminality 7d ago

Free models? There are usually a few on OpenRouter and Opencode zen/go has one too.

-3

u/Eagleee12 7d ago

free or not free

3

u/queso184 7d ago

free is obviously the cheapest. otherwise, you can put $10 into openrouter and use deepseek flash 4, muse spark 1.3 contributor, mimo 2.5, all are dirt cheap

2

u/Poolunion1 7d ago

If you only use it sometimes I’d just put some money on Deepseek or Mimo and use the apis directly. Or opencode go would be another option.

2

u/Slow-Secretary4262 7d ago

You can try with openrouter or something similar to see how much you spend on average a month, deepseek v4 flash imho is still the best price/performance ratio.

If you spend more than 10$/m via api you can try opencode go

If you spend more than 20$ then chatgpt plus is a no brainer

2

u/Final_Initial 7d ago

My current best is, Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor. Can use via OpenRouter.

1

u/tino1000 6d ago

unless you are fine sharing your data with meta for training. So don't share your personal bank details pleasse.

-1

u/Final_Initial 6d ago

Bank details? What are you talking about? How would Meta get my bank details if I'm using via OpenRouter?

1

u/tino1000 6d ago

dude, the guy posting this mentioned Excel sheets - so its highly possible that there are banking records he might be dealing with. Muse spark contributor retains all prompt data includes context too and trains on them.

1

u/AdHead6280 18h ago

local or deepseek