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by kordlessagain 261 days ago
You make an account to use their hosted models AND to have them available via the Ollama API LOCALLY. I'm spending $100 on Claude and $200 on GPT5, so $20 bucks is NOTHING and totally worth having access to:

Qwen3 235b

Deepseek 3.1 671b (thinking and non thinking)

Llama 3.1 405b

GPT OSS 120b

Those are hardly "small inferior models".

What is really cool is that you can set Codex up to use Ollama's API and then have it run tools on different models.

3 comments

Has anyone tried the hosted models? How do they compare to GPT-5?

I was thinking about trying ChatGPT Pro, but I seem to have completely missed that they bumped the price from $100 to $200. It was $100 just a while ago, right? Before GPT-5, I assume.

No it was never $100 for ChatGPT Pro.
How does it compare to AzureAI which has all the best models and you don’t need to sign up with anyone other than Azure itself?
If you are on $100 tier Claude, what makes you think the $20 Tier Ollama is enough for you ?
If your workflow is general enough, you can (and should) switch between models. They all have different styles and blind spots.

Like I had Codex + gpt-5-codex (20€ tier) build me a network connectivity monitor for my very specific use case.

It worked, but had some really weird choices. Gave it to Claude Code (20€ tier again) and it immediately found a few issues and simplifications.

Right. And then there's using an MCP tool that instantiates another agent except uses a different model.

Here's a good example. For summarization of a page of content. Content is maybe pulled down by an agentic crawler, so using a local model to summarize is great. It's fast, doesn't cost anything (or much) and I can run it without guardrails as it doesn't represent a cost risk if it ran out of control.

Clearly articulated and repeating what makes the $20 Ollama tier valuable to me is:

1. Access to specific large open models (Qwen3 235b, Deepseek 3.1 671b, Llama 3.1 405b, GPT OSS 120b)

2. Having them available via the Ollama API LOCALLY

3. The ability to set up Codex to use Ollama's API for running tools on different models

I mean, really, nothing else is even close at this point and I would rather eat a bug than use Microsoft's cloud.