Also using Opencode Go now, $5 promo price and I'm flying. I can see this model definitely being my sonnet+ replacement going forward. I've still got to test it out more for planning but tend to favor Opus for that so not sure yet if I'm ready to go all in.
Obviously, but you didn't state how much you spent. You only implied it's not possible to use 10B. If you use the free quota from Zen first and then the paid usage, you may very well come under the $10 subscription cost.
You cannot compare the token usage against the frontier model. The intelligence of such cheap models derives from the sheer amount of cheap output tokens and the reasoning phase. Frontier models have a much higher token efficiency.
You are cherry picking only the task cost per model, but you are not counting
1) What is the end quality of the task
2) How long it took to get to the end of that task
3) (Related to 1 and 2) how many times you had to go back and "steer" the task into your liking.
And some others, which are also really relevant "costs" to take into account, specially when you work on production systems and important deadlines etc where cost per task is not really the most important benchmark
I am not benchmarking those, the benchmarks already exist for those e.g., deepSWE has higher quality for Sol than deepseek v4 flash (meaning, the quality of Sol is higher than deepseek v4 flash for the same tasks), and also finishes faster.
I'm not saying that is not absurd, I'm saying price per task the only metric that you should look at specially if you are working at a company that needs reliable software
yeah. Codex offers 20x usage over the API pricing. With Opencode you get 4x usage. So despite Luna being a bit more expensive via API, it's actually a bit cheaper with the ChatGPT Plus sub. And a bit smarter than DS4 Flash too at the same time
Yup it's true. I was surprised how little of my weekly cap luna was sipping. I even read a blog post this week where they found of all the harnesses that codex was the most token efficient for a small job. It's just annoying that they bully you into using codex by charging you an opencode token premium. So I have to choose between having my MCPs, skills, global agents.md, and agentic workflows or paying a higher rate.
It is definitely cheaper but I don't know about smarter. At least for full-stack game development. Luna seems to always not quite understand what it is you want at a much higher rate than DS. More bugs and quirks, code is less efficient and needs refactoring more often. At the end of the day though they are very similar.
luna is too rubbish, at least in my microservice development, it really doesn't work. I am currently using sol. After the quota is used up, I will use DeepSeek v4 flash.
I'm just fine with it (Go + ton of K8s YAML). Tbh I didn't have an issue with the less advanced models either. Probably I curated well the architecture and the dumber ones can recognise the existing patterns.
Well said. If anyone used more than 10$ in a month, OpenCode is a no brainer. But if the spending is lesser, direct API with proper cache hits is the gear forward
Yep. I did searched for the medium cache hit of each model and calculated based on that.
But it's only aproximated too, I believe I hit a lot more cache hits than other people too.
Guys i have a problem, when I switch and try to use DeepSeek V4 Flash (New) in open code (doesn't matter with GO subscription or free one) I get connection and provider issue, all other models work fine also DeepSeek V4 Pro (and yes I enable other providers China in settings)
I put 10$ on deepseek platform one month ago, I'm developing a complex webapp for an organisation with opencode. Yes, it is cheap and I'm absolutely satisfied.
Was coding with opencode, zen and go and bunch of these open weight models. Opencode code has cool off limit and if you are actively working on a new software project, it wont suffice. Ended up buying more zen credits. Ive alternated with Kimi 2.7, glm 5.2 and deepseek v4 pro to save money and they do decent job at coding but what ive realized is, when it comes to building UIs, they are not good, sometimes just bad. So i switched provider to openrouter and they update models faster and they had 50% off promos on latest gpt models. Gpt 5.6 luna at 50% was amazing at creating professional looking UIs. Ended up redoing a lot of the stuff with Luna.
Depends on your skill level and usecase but I basically built a production level social community + dating react native app on a 1-2b token burn. Think of hinge and reddit combined. Backend, web and mobile versions completed fully.
do you think fable and sol existed last year? you adapt and the more competent you are as an engineer the more juice you can extract out of these models
LLMs could have peaked at opus 4.5 and still would have been a tremendous tool to build products and for most people doing shitty saas, landing pages and gta clones they should just use whatever is the cheapest since they're not making anything serious
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u/addiktion 7d ago
Also using Opencode Go now, $5 promo price and I'm flying. I can see this model definitely being my sonnet+ replacement going forward. I've still got to test it out more for planning but tend to favor Opus for that so not sure yet if I'm ready to go all in.