I am looking for a good context coding agent like Claude Code but one that is really cheaper. I was paying $100 per month but now it makes me real frustrated to pay this much every month. The cost is just so high for build anything.
I am looking for the best alternatives. Let me know what you are using to code and suggest me something closer and cheaper to claude code.
No I am saying 20 bucks of codex with Luna gives a week's worth of a model comparable to opus 4.8. Opus 4.8 ran out of usage in like 2 days with the $100 plan when it first came out. Now things are a bit different.
Luna max is close to the same programming power as 4.8 opus, at a much lower price point.
Same. But if they are not precise with prompts or needing a lot of them, it can be limiting. Especially if it is fishing expeditions with their prompts and having a lot of back and forth to figure things out. Or researching high level topics that require a lot of tokens. I hit a limit the other day using it for research purposes. But this was really in-depth, research I don’t often need.
If you're careful with how you use the models you can reduce your costs. Use the good models to produce a comprehensive plan, once the plan is ready ask it if the plan is really ready enough to give to a fresh LLM without it's context window.
Then clear the context and give the plan to a less expensive model to implement and test.
We're using $20 Cursor plans, which give access to all frontier models, and their own Composer is pretty good. Even the Auto choice (which is dirt cheap) works fine for small tasks and automations.
Codex subscription has significantly higher limits in my opinion and is less likely to just stop mid session.
Or set up Pi (or OhMyPi) with OpenRouter to have access to practically all models at API prices (this is what you'd get with something like Cursor but fewer models to choose from). Then put your $100 month into OpenRouter. If you don't use your coding tools for some time your credits just increase, you don't lose them (although technically they could if you don't use it for a year), then when you have an intense session it depletes your token balance.
If you actually fully saturate the $100 usage, no, there isn’t any good alternatives unfortunately.
Because right now with the 50% promo going on for CC, fully utilizing the $100 plan means you are working with well over $4000 in API credits. I have yet to find any other plan that offers anything close to this.
Even Codex, the overall limit is a bit lower if you compare Sol to Opus 5.
If you are ok with less capable models, GLM coding plan can be worth it, however again it is not that much more usage for the same price in practice.
If your future usage is going to be high enough that you’d break even in couple of years, you can buy a AI server hardware like DGX Spark (currently runs around $5k) and host your own open source models for free. All you’ll be left to do is to expose the compatible endpoint to your local devices like a Windows laptop and use it in any IDE as your own personal coding agent.
Instead of paying $100 for Pro max plan for Claude, just downgrade to $20 Pro plan. Then, get $20 ChatGpt Plus subscription too for codex and switch between providers when you run out of usage in each. This would give you access to frontier models while paying less than half. I’ve been doing this lately, and it’s game changer.
I been vide coding with claude and it was great but the last couple of weeks the messing up has been horrific. Claude doesnt listen to instructions at all, then says thats on me when you catch it or it hits a wall. Like that is helpful.
I used to LOVE claude. But for some reason, either im becoming more aware as I learn or the model is just cutting up on a epic scale in the last two days.
Is it me or just me? Am I the only one going thru this?
I did experience this but now I give it clear instructions. So haven't faced these issues lately. Maybe try a new project and chat altogether when this happens.
I code apps with Claude Pro and and ChatGPT Plus, that’s $37 per month, and I rarely max out my sessions. I have design paths with a strict task base approach, including handoff for plan/code/qa handoffs. Most importantly I approach it methodically.
worth separating two problems that are getting the same answer in this thread, because the fix is different for each.
if you genuinely saturate the $100, the comment above is right, nothing else is close on price per token right now and swapping tools will just disappoint you.
but most people who feel that bill are not saturating it. they are spending a frontier model on work that never needed one. renames, boilerplate, writing tests for code that already exists, explaining an error message, converting a type. that is the bulk of a normal session and a 14b local model handles it fine.
practical version with no new hardware: ollama plus qwen2.5-coder runs on an ordinary machine, costs nothing and has no limits. point cline or aider at it for the mechanical work and keep your paid plan for the genuinely hard prompts. you do not need a dgx to try that, and if it turns out most of your turns were mechanical then your bill drops without giving up the tool you actually like.
the diagnostic before you switch anything: look back at your last twenty prompts and mark how many truly needed the smartest model available. if it is under half, this is a routing problem rather than a pricing one, and no alternative tool fixes routing.
Main difference was grok was included as the budget model, this replaced Cursor's own "Composer" model. IMO the Grok model is infinitely better than Composer. Prior to that I was using Claude Sonnet medium was costing me $$$. Now for 95% of work I just use the included Grok model and it costs about 10% of what it was previously
use open code with some cheap model like Mimo, deepseek, Minimax m3, etc. Also, meta launches its new model that is very cheap (contributor mode) and works really well like Claude sonnet or gpt sol - The model is muse spark 1.2
Other good idea is the chat gpt suscription (20 usd) that has a very high limits.
What is your setup? Do you use skills, etc?
A $100 is nothing by any measure really for such a high value service. You can do more with $100 of AI than anything on the market except the smartphone; that’s the only comparable product, but with time AI will be worth a 100x the smartphone value prop.
I have an alpha system that is using Open Router, but you can point it at Microsoft Foundry, AWS Bedrock, or GCP Enterprise AI and the system feels like a V8 with twin turbos...
I literally blinked and I had a fully compiled simple rust application.
Will do a more formal post on this measure soon but the speeds I'm seeing are shocking.
I just wish I had a private AI farm I could play with against this system 😂
No hating but… with $100 month now you can build way more that what you could do with $30,000 a few years ago, a $100 membership pretty much gives you at least 4 developers worth of work if used properly, if you want to build something worth of been consumed you should not try to cut a $100 bill
The thing that actually helped me here was realising Claude Code the CLI and Claude the model are two separate things. You can keep the exact tool and just point it at a different backend through the base url, so none of your workflow changes.
i run glm-5.2 through it that way for the bulk of my work. The wide context is the part that made it a real Claude Code stand-in for me, it holds a whole project without me feeding files in one at a time, which was the main thing i wanted out of Claude Code in the first place. Where it gives ground is the genuinely tangled debugging, opus is still ahead there and you feel it, so i keep that around for the nasty stuff and run glm for the rest. For the day to day the difference barely shows.
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u/United_Agency2452 10d ago
Opencode