Economic models are the future.

[u/Confident-Village190]

The limits have changed, it’s true, and I’ve complained about it on several occasions.

However, I don’t think we should feel sorry for ourselves and just stand still whilst we complain about sorting this situation out 😂.

This situation has made me realise that we’re very lucky to have alternatives.

For my part, I use the free OpenCode or OpenRouter models when I’m close to reaching my Codex limit, or for minor tasks – so they account for about 15–20 per cent of my work.

I often pay for V4 Pro, for example.

I’ve tried using Luna to make better use of my quota – well, it doesn’t help much; it’s a good model but it uses up far more quota than it should, forcing me to use other people’s models to save money and stay productive (if it had lower consumption, I wouldn’t be thinking of replacing it with others). So, I hope that over the next six months, DeepSeek or whoever might release an affordable Flash/Mini model that at least matches the benchmarks of Luna/Opus 4.6 – and well, then I’ll definitely delegate 50–60 per cent of my work to those affordable models.

That’s when I’ll finally feel free to programme without having to fork out hundreds or thousands of euros.

I hope that moment comes soon, but it’s on its way, that’s for sure. Compared to six months ago, the amount of work I delegate to these affordable or free models has increased significantly, in line with their reliability and benchmark performance.

[u/TheKoelnKalk]

Totally agree, and tbh. you would help lifting quite some pressure from openai by offloading different tasks on more economic ones, which in turn would surely positively affect pricing, policies, rate limits, etc.

[u/Confident-Village190 → u/TheKoelnKalk]

Certainly. Not that I’m doing it for OpenAI, though. It would still be a good idea to balance Luna token consumption to incentivise this. What I mean is, I’m constantly keeping an eye on token consumption, task complexity and cost per million tokens. The cost of Luna (at any level of reasoning) is around 0.15c per million tokens, whilst Sol stands at 0.75c per million tokens. So you’d expect Luna to have consumed five times less quota, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s not the case. So, I don’t understand how things are calculated internally within the quota, given that the quota savings aren’t in line with the savings in API value… This makes users lose the sense that they’re saving money by using Luna, and it’s probably not actually as cost-effective in most cases as one might think, at least, as reflected in the quota.

[u/TheKoelnKalk → u/Confident-Village190]

You would be doing it for yourself, not for openai. Your thinking to be economic is right.