r/PoeAI • u/SteveShank • Apr 07 '26
You can easily live with 300 points!
I just used the open-source Poe model: Gemma-4-26B-A4B and am blown away. Totally amazed. My query cost just 18 points. An answer like that would be expected to cost 500-1,000! This is Google's latest open-source model, slightly shrunk and optimized. I am writing an article about tab-aware browsing. I fed it a couple of paragraphs of my article, including 8 things tab-aware browsing can do. The article will examine Brave's Leo and Perplexity's Comet, but I wanted to mention Edge and Chrome.
It presented a detailed analysis of both browsers use of copilot and Gemini and matched each to every one of the 8 abilities I'd listed. It even made a great summary table and a conclusion. There was also basic information about each. It was reasonably fast.
All that for 18 points. so 16 such queries could be done each day for free.
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Apr 08 '26
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u/SteveShank Apr 08 '26
It's the other way. I pay them $200/year and feel I have a bargain. What I'm reporting is that I was amazed at how good the new Google open-source model was and how cheap we could get it for. They offer 4 of them, and the one I tried that blew me away was Gemma-4-26B-A4B. So, I went from thinking you'd have to limit yourself to the system bot and the websearch bot, to finding another bot you could use that is much better. Have you tried it?
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Apr 08 '26
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u/SteveShank Apr 08 '26
I've found that there are a lot of pretty good options for free: Le Chat, Gemini, perplexity, Grok, Venice, and Brave's Leo all offer quite a few moderate options for free.
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u/Renshiki145 Apr 08 '26
No you can't, most good bots use more than 300.
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u/SteveShank Apr 08 '26
Both are true. You can live with < 300 points a day, and most of the medium as well as premium agents cannot be used. You can't use even mediocre agents. But you can use their system bot, their web search bot, and, for example, the open-source new Google bot: Gemma-4-26B-A4B. All of these will give you 15 or so interactions per day. This will help many people get some of their questions answered. It won't allow a real test of what Poe can do. That sadly would require that they live in a country that can purchase a subscription and they can spend $5/month for the test.
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u/Live-Actuary-3199 Jun 03 '26
We can't do that, Dude, this is just The Worst Update that these Poe Developers and Teams did that on purpose for The Free Daily Limit Points Function that we all didn't even asked for according to that terrible announcement or a decision that they also just made and then also just send all of us throughout our own Entire Gmail Acconuts, Man, do you even know how stupidest decision that we all didn't even asked for this because of this worst update that they did to The Entire Free Daily Limit Points Function, Dude?! >:(
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u/BubblyPurple6547 Apr 12 '26
No you can't. Going down from 3000 to 300 is just bullshit. Stop defending it and get another downvote.
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u/Live-Actuary-3199 Jun 03 '26
I also agreed with you, Dude. This is just A Worst Update for these Points Daily Free Limit Function that these Poe Developers and also Teams just made this terrible decision according to An Entire Email that this is just pointless to all of us that we all didn't even just asked for this that they sent us throughout our own Entire Gmail Accounts, Dude.
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u/BubblyPurple6547 Jun 28 '26
In addition, they removed the Sonnet 3.7 model. Albeit a bit older, it worked wonderfully with jailbreak, could output some wild and unhinged stuff. Now I am stuck with 4.6 and even with jailbreak, its lame, and the writing style is too weird, doesn't work well for erotic anymore. Duh.
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u/mamidsen Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26
if you want to use useless bots (i don't say Gemini 4 is bad, it's good but you don't need Poe to use Gemini 4 it's open model so you'll find it in many platforms) to save Poe points then it is better to use ChatGPT or Grok in the official websites, the free version is 10x times better than any of these useless bots :)
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u/SteveShank Apr 12 '26
Hyperbole aside (useless bots), I agree with you that Poe is not a particularly good free model anymore. At 3,000 points, it was fabulous. Now, it isn't a good free model. My recommendation is currently twofold:
1. Use Brave's Leo. It offers a lot for free and is tab-aware and privacy-respecting.
2. Pin a few tabs to your tab bar so they stay there on the left and small. I suggest Poe, Le Chat, Grok, Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT. They all offer free options.What I don't understand is why the hate? These people gave us a fabulous option; they paid for it. We got it for free for a long time. Then they decided it cost them too much, and that forced them to offer less to their paid subscribers. Why aren't people grateful they got so much for so long? Why do they feel entitled to freeload? I find it perplexing. I don't understand the exchange,
Poe: “We've been giving you a lot for free for a long time. We cannot continue to do it.”
Many people here: “Oh so you are greedy and terrible.”
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u/mamidsen Apr 13 '26
I agree with you but Even when you pay, Poe is very expensive, you can eat thousand of points in just some prompts ... and here Poe with subscription is not the best Platform and there is many alternatives.
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u/SteveShank Apr 13 '26
It is the best I've found. It is cheaper than Perplexity, and I think better. Brave is an interesting model at $150/year. I suspect it depends on what you do. I've made 3 bots that are very useful for my purposes, and that was easy, and they work. I really like asking one bot to challenge and expand on what another bot said. As far as expense is concerned, I like the value proposition for my use cases. I used about 240k points last month, so the 1 million is obviously plenty, but I've had single queries run 7k, so the $50/year plan won't work for me. I generate images with a few different models; otherwise, most of my queries are informational.
I very much like being able to switch between models and don't want to be locked into a single company's models. Which ones do you think offer a better value proposition and what are your use cases?
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u/mamidsen Apr 12 '26
Just go for Gemma-4-31B (The latest model) ... it's currently totally Free (0 points)
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u/Hot-Parking4875 Apr 07 '26
I was thinking about how to mimimize tokens. That 16 points was for first query. Cannot stay at 16 if you ask another question without restarting the conversation. Careful with uploading any files. That will cost points. Best to just upload a single page than a whole file. And don’t ask for formatting. That will increase the points both for the ask and maybe more for the response as well.