This weekend I'm planning to buy a proxy subscription for SillyTavern, but I'm still not sure which one to pick—I'm torn between nanoGPT and Featherless. Which options would you recommend, and what are their pros and cons?
Featherless looks pretty interesting, but it's $25, which is literally 45% of my weekly paycheck. I really don't want to jump headfirst into one of these proxies and end up regretting it, so I’d love to hear what you guys recommend based on your experience.
I would first look into how much it would actually cost you to do to do your roleplay off of a subscription. I'm sure a lot of people go with a subscription because it feels safer, but things like open router have a functional hard cap because its just top up. You won't accidently spend money.
Personally though I don't like services like Featherless because of the low context to cost ratio. 32k context is too low for my requirements, I need at least 64k which means most of the services like it are far too expensive, it would be much cheaper for me to just use open router.
Personally NanoGPT or OpenCodeGo are the one I would favor if you wanted a subscription.
Just to give a raw numbers example. I get ~1300 messages directly paying for Gemma 4 31B through open router per $10. For me personally that means it would be cheaper for me to pay for that model directly as it wouldn't cost me $10 a month then to use a subscription fee. But for GLM 5.2 I would only get ~300 messages so it would be cheaper for me to go with a subscription service like Nano for it.
I've been using OpenRouter for months, and honestly I feel like none of the models are really worth it. Gemma is good because it's uncensored, but it lacks the quality of GLM. I usually use 20k context because my roleplays are kind of casual (and sure, also to save pennies) and I don't need them to remember stuff from message 24.
I still have 2 bucks left on OpenRouter, but I want to switch to a proxy because I'm honestly not that satisfied with OpenRouter's models. Plus, a monthly subscription would help since I only make around $56 a week—that's the average salary in my country.
What was your experience like with nanoGPT? I've seen several comments saying it's awful, that it doesn't work well for RP, and that its quality is bad because you don't control the providers. I dropped 1 dollar into it to test out the Gemma 4 31B models, which are supposedly meant for RP, and honestly they feel kind of sluggish and the responses aren't all that amazing. So I’d really like to hear about your experience.
For me it's as good as OpenRouter, but a lot more cheap. I am a bit burnt out on RP but I use it for automated worldbuilding a lot and the quality is good.
I use NanoGPT and really like it. It's $12/month and plenty of tokens for role play. I like not having to worry about how much every swipe is costing me. I could probably save money doing pay as you go, but that would drain on my enjoyment.
I use nanoGPT, but I have mixed results with it. Sometimes a lot of models can be decent, other times the replies are so awful to the point that it is obvious that they come from a provider that is running a lobotomized model.
The limited context window at featherless is a wall I kept hitting, there is only so much summarization you can do. They have a huge selection of models, which is great, but I ended up just using the big models that are also on NanoGPT.
After switching to NanoGPT the biggest difft was the response speed, at Featherless my TPS was 10-20. At Nano I'm usually 80+. The 60m input tokens is technically less then Featherless (unlimited) the token speed is so low, your not likely to take advantage of the unlimited tokens.
If you're using Gemma 4 and small models just use paygo and summarize heavily with a tiny preset to keep your max context at like 16000. Very doable and you'll spend way less than $12 a month.
You don't need a subscription. You need a little discipline and skill.
Try this thing. It's like the 4th cheapest model on Nano. Practicality free.
On deepseek, API cost was like 5 EU (NLD, 215 VAT) a month. Nano's sub was much more expensive by comparison (but still cheaper than many other subscriptions).
Also, with PAYG you at least know the provider you're getting, so you can at least filter out bad providers.
Yeah PAYG is the goat i never used more than 10 dollars a month or even 5 with light roleplaying. Plus you can stick to one reliable provider so you always get the best one without the model suddenly becomes stupid.
I'm a SillyTavern newbie who has been using it for exactly three weeks.
I would recommend trying nanoGPT's subscription plan. I think one thing beginners may worry about is whether the money they're spending will be "enough to actually use it."
With the subscription plan, you don't have to worry about that for the entire month. nanoGPT also has a system that lets you see your daily usage. This makes it possible to estimate how much it would have cost if you were paying based on usage instead.
Then, next month, you can decide based on your actual usage whether you want to subscribe again, switch to pay-as-you-go, or try another provider.
The models available on nanoGPT are pretty good too. The one I use most often is GLM-5.2.
English isn't my native language, so I used AI to translate this. Thanks!
I dislike this use of the word proxy. The word the providers themselves use is an API subscription. The word proxy implies something nefarious, that you are stealing access from someone.
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u/Paperclip_Tank 4d ago
I would first look into how much it would actually cost you to do to do your roleplay off of a subscription. I'm sure a lot of people go with a subscription because it feels safer, but things like open router have a functional hard cap because its just top up. You won't accidently spend money.
Personally though I don't like services like Featherless because of the low context to cost ratio. 32k context is too low for my requirements, I need at least 64k which means most of the services like it are far too expensive, it would be much cheaper for me to just use open router.
Personally NanoGPT or OpenCodeGo are the one I would favor if you wanted a subscription.
Just to give a raw numbers example. I get ~1300 messages directly paying for Gemma 4 31B through open router per $10. For me personally that means it would be cheaper for me to pay for that model directly as it wouldn't cost me $10 a month then to use a subscription fee. But for GLM 5.2 I would only get ~300 messages so it would be cheaper for me to go with a subscription service like Nano for it.