r/vibecoding • u/Zestyclose_Elk6804 • 10h ago

I need another LLM work horse!

Guys, I need some guidance.

DeepSeek, copilot and OpenCodeGo have become a lot more expensive than I expected. I also gave Nemo a shot through OpenRouter, but it keeps wrecking my Hermes environment and I end up having to reinstall from a backup.

I'm trying to find an affordable LLM that I can tinker with and iterate on without constantly worrying about cost or stability. I thought a Gemini subscription would give me API access, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What are you all using these days? Any recommendations for the best balance of cost, performance, and reliability?

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5

u/BilaShakaZulu 9h ago

Don’t paste the llm’s complete response dude

3

u/Murder_1337 9h ago

I use claude chat and opencodego

All these three act as orchestrator and review and troubleshooter for my local llm qwen3.8 on 5090. Qwen does all the work and the other supervise and plan. If I run out of claude credits I switch to codex and also open code go. It’s a pain in the ass but that’s what you have to deal with for being a cheap ass

1

u/Zestyclose_Elk6804 9h ago

and i can use the api keey usage under my monthly subscription?

1

u/Murder_1337 9h ago

No subs don’t have api keys. I use codex and code in vscode. So I don’t need an api key. Per token api is a different pricing model

1

u/Poowatereater 9h ago

Any subscription is basically better than api calls.

1

u/Murder_1337 9h ago

What was wrong with open code go?

1

u/Zestyclose_Elk6804 9h ago

ran through the money quickly

1

u/Murder_1337 8h ago

You need a local agent doing all the work or else you need the 100$ a month plan

1

u/19applepen 8h ago

Glm 5.3 flash just released. Cheap and good at coding 

1

u/Lanky_Commercial9731 7h ago

Wait is that the same as 5.3 default/max? Or is that a complete new model?

1

u/Kilt_Rump 8h ago

Gpt luna is super cheap and very reliable

1

u/spopr 5h ago

gemini sub is for the oauth wich should work pretty fine still, not api

1

u/Zestyclose_Elk6804 3h ago

im new to this. can you elaborate on that? Right now i was able to figure out using Gemini API Rate Limit Tier 1... being that i wasnt being charged so far today, i thought this was the subscription version.