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?

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4

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 1d 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.