[pixlmint]

Last month, I cancelled my Claude Pro subscription and instead used those 20$ to purchase Openrouter Credits. Most of my knowledge-seeking questions can be answered by Gemma4, for basic code editing, Qwen3.6 27b is enough, and for really difficult tasks, GLM5.2 doesn't leave me hanging. I'm by no means a heavy AI user, so I'm even saving money going the API Credit route and relying on the smallest possible model depending on the task complexity.

[_def]

I literally burned through 20USD in a couple of hours on openrouter with deepseek v4 pro and opencode tasks - i'm sure i did something wrong

[diseasedyak]

Not saying this is what you did, but I found out the hard way that keeping a context window open for a long time burns tokens like crazy. I had a Hermes session using DeepSeek v4 Pro via Ollama, and ate half my weekly token allotment in a couple hours, just by piling on more and more work inside the same prompt, instead of exiting out and starting a new session (or using the Hermes command to start a new session without exiting).

[james2doyle]

Yeah sounds like maybe you got stuck in a loop? If you’re a big Deepseek fan, check out their Codewhale harness. It is actually really slick and you can use your OpenRouter account with it.

You can use any model you want but it is really tailored to work well with the Deepseek duo

[NostraDavid]

What do you use as interface to OpenRouter? I, too, am looking into using an API to see if I can reduce costs (I use OpenAI + Github Copilot, currently). TensorX instead of OpenRouter (because it's in Europe, and EURouter wanted 15% more money from me :P), but I'm not sure if I want to change a configuration in vscode every time I want to switch the model in the Claude extension (and having an API key in my settings feels iffy too >_>)

[pixlmint]

I have OpenWebui hosted on my homelab, but you can also just have it live on your machine in a docker container. I honestly just embrace the iffy feeling. Openrouter has very good telemetry (which is partly why I went with them) and it'd be pretty easy to notice when someone other than myself uses my keys. For the little agentic coding I do I like to use OpenCode, and if I need to ask a question in my editor I use CodeCompanion (neovim AI chat plugin). I quickly went to check what OpenCode does with the API key, and it doesn't seem to store it in the user config, so that's at least something. But yeah, really recommend OpenWebui as a ChatGPT replacement (though there are a lot more alternatives out there, I just already knew owui from when I was playing around with local models)

[KronisLV]

In VSCode: Cline or KiloCode are both good.

In the terminal: you can get Claude Code or others working but honestly OpenCode or Pi might be better with many models.

[k8sToGo]

I use Openwebui

[hersko]

Zed

[khimaros]

pi.dev