[jerojero]

Open weight models from Chinese labs tend to be significantly cheaper.

I think theyre absolutely needed. I can't afford 200 USD a month for personal use of coding AI, and I don't think such prices are reasonable for most of the world economy anyway. Not to mention US firms might be giving their employees a lot more than that.

It's increasingly feeling, to me, that theres a gap building up between haves and have nots. But then, we get news of these open weight models that are reasonably priced in inference with reasonable capabilities. Yes, they take maybe 6-9 months to get there, tbh, that's not a bad trade off at all.

[fbrncci]

You made me realize something. I routinely spend upwards of 500$ per month on LLMs for coding (expensed towards clients). However I live in a place where 500$ is around the avg. salary. I’m lucky that I know my way around western clients. Clients who pay these expenses and are happy to work with me because I am still about 50% cheaper than local talent in EU/US, while my salary at home converts to an upper class income at the highest tax bracket.

Which of course causes some unfairness on both ends. Nobody here can compete with me. I often use left over tokens on local client projects; which despite lower pay, still pays off because they now take hours not days or weeks to complete. And nobody in the local clients talent pool can compete with me; unless they charge about half the market rate.

Take away my 500$ monthly grant; and I’d be more or less screwed. Better open models will more or less start to reduce this advantage. It’s not like I positioned myself here on purpose. But it’s definitely a „right place, right time“ situation.

[swader999]

If you are running multiple agents your cost to them should be multiples less what their roi is.

[fbrncci]

My costs are 0$ as any token or subscription spend on agents is invoiced as an expense to my clients.

[arikrahman]

Someone else on this forum put it well, U.S. is trying to achieve AGI at all costs, while Chinese models are seeking widespread adoption.

[azinman2]

I don't think anthropic/openai/google aren't also seeing widespread adoption. In fact they already have they already have the marketshare.

[tacomagick]

DeepSeek through their own API has saved me tons of tokens honestly. Even though it is not as smart as Kimi or Claude, their level of entry is very low with a top up of 2$ and Pay as you go compared to the subscription of Claude or 20$ top up of Kimi

[praveer13]

For personal use I’m considering using the frontier models from openai or anthropic to create a plan with research and brainstorming etc with enough details for cheap models to be able to follow (glm, deepseek etc) - with openrouter - will monitor how cheap and effective that turns out to be.

[ImaCake]

You should try out the cheaper models first. I find Deepseek v4 models pretty comparable to sonnet 4.6 but at a fraction of the cost. You might find you just don't need to use the American models at all.

[ImaCake]

Significantly cheaper than comparable models if you are using openrouter [0]. Just yesterday I spent roughly 13 cents centering some divs using Deepseek in a personal project. It would have been north of $1 to do that with a US frontier model.

0. https://openrouter.ai/compare/z-ai/glm-5.2/anthropic/claude-...

[Fr0styMatt88]

If we can agree that the AI model is at least as capable as a junior engineer or new contractor, how’s that different to saying “software engineering isn’t worth $200 a month”?

Has a very race-to-the-bottom feel to it.

Though in the grand scheme of it, $200/mo probably isn’t the real price either. Also looking at it not just in a vacuum - paying for a product that can change what you get from under you doesn’t seem great anyway.

At least with a locally-hosted model you know what you’re getting.

[matheusmoreira]

Yeah. There's no way to verify what these providers are doing. The real future is running these models at home. Opus level inference on our own hardware would be a dream come true.

[IncreasePosts]

How will anyone running home instances be able to compete against people paying some money running much more powerful models on much more powerful hardware?

[Fr0styMatt88]

It’ll be interesting.

I’m using Qwen3.6:27B at home and mostly Sonnet/Opus (depending on the complexity of the task) at work.

You have to break things down into smaller chunks for the local models. For the bigger cloud ones they can do a lot of the broader thinking.

[matheusmoreira]

> It's increasingly feeling, to me, that theres a gap building up between haves and have nots.

People speak of a permanent underclass.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-for...

[throwaway-blaze]

Just don't ask it to tell you the events of June 4, 1989.

[ttoinou]

200 is much less than the value you’re supposed to get out of it. If it’s not then yeah go ahead and use cheaper models with worst quality

[martinjc]

Are you aware of how much purchasing power 200 dollars is in china, brazil, thailand or india is? This is an extremely arrogant take.

[nwienert]

I’ve hired many asian developers anywhere from 1-4k a month.

I get a lot more out of a 200/mo subscription now in a week than I did from them in a month.

Now obviously in today’s world they’d be using a 200/mo subscription themselves. But it’s not like money is nothing, software development doesn’t scale down below 1k/mo for anyone competent even in the poorest areas.

[matheusmoreira]

For the record, 200 USD is around 60% of the brazilian minimum wage.

[Dayshine]

I'm not sure how I'm supposed to get $200 of value out of personal use!

[LPisGood]

Note that 200 dollars of value is different than 200 dollars of profit.

[devmor]

I personally don’t find it that useful for most tasks, but if say, you get paid $50/hr for your work and it saves you more than 4 hours of work in a month, there you go.

[selcuka]

Obviously this assumes that you can find 4+ extra hours of $50/hr work every month, or you can work 4 hours less. Neither of these assumptions is correct for people who work for a fixed salary.

[holoduke]

Here most of my colleagues have +200 dollar rates. It's really a no brainer. But sure, in south America or some Asian countries maybe it is. But still most devs need it anyway. Also in the poor regions.

[HDBaseT]

$200/h is on the extreme end and I would argue most people here aren't anywhere close to that.

The median hourly wage in the US is $28/h, this equates to nearly 7.5 hours. A full day of work a month for the average person to use Claude with reasonable limits.

Yes, the people on $28/h may not be the software development types, so their income might not be as high, but these are the people who would probably be vibe coding the most since they aren't day to day programmers!

[ray_kay777]

I suspect the reply above is referring to charge out rates rather than wages.

[folkrav]

Most of the world's developers, even in not-poor regions, make significantly less than what your colleagues charge.

[uberex]

Unless that value is $200 cash in hand it will be hard to afford it for people who just don't have $200.

[margalabargala]

Last time you bought a computer, did you buy the absolute fastest best CPU available?

[girvo]

Yes, but that was because I could see the writing on the wall with respect to hardware prices being cooked by AI demand, so I built the best computer possible at the time knowing it'd probably need to last me the next 5+ years

So not really comparable. I use Step 3.7 Flash locally, models are good enough for so many coding tasks even at the lower end! (Though I note that calling a 200B model "lower end" is kind of amusing)

[smrtinsert]

I've actually come to believe the overwhelming majority of use cases require nowhere frontier quality so there's that. Much faster execution is just a bonus on top of the much reduced cost