[mark_l_watson]

It is painful, but I have done the same thing: dropping any paid use of OpenAI. For years, basically since I retired from managing a deep learning team at Capital One, I have spent a ton of time experimenting with all LLM options.

Enough! I just paid for a year of Gemini Pro, I use gemini-cli for free for small sessions, turn on using my API key for longer sessions to avoid timeout, and most importantly: for API use I mostly just use Gemini 2.5-flash, sometimes -pro, and Moonshot’s Kimi K2. I also use local models on Ollama when they are sufficient (which is surprisingly often.)

I simply decided that I no longer wanted the hobby of always trying everything. I did look again at Mistral a few weeks ago, a good option, but Google was a good option for me.