[cmrdporcupine]

GLM is actually quite expensive in actual practice because it's not very token efficient. I've yet to find a way to run it on a monthly sub reliably for cheaper than Codex.

Neuralwatt was cheap (but slow) but they cranked their price.

Ollama monthly sub is speedy but doesn't offer a lot of quota.

Right now unless you're paying by the token, there's no cost based reason to use the open weight models for daily coding work because the monthly coding plans from Anthropic and OpenAI are a better deal.

[computerex]

I know GLM is relatively expensive and so is Kimi, in comparison to those DeepSeek V4 pro and flash are a godsend and are absolutely good value.

[arizen]

And DeepSeek V4 Flash + GLM 5.2 is a really good blend of both (fast/cheap DS + more intelligent GLM)

[versteegen]

I think MiMo 2.5 seems to be better than DS4 Flash, at the same price. DS4F can write pretty advanced code but it way overthinks the simple stuff, its CoT is full of errors (immediately corrects itself), and yesterday I was shocked it reliably struggled to spot a misplaced % in a format string when reading a whole file.

[calgoo]

Exactly, I design in glm 5.2, and then build with deepseek pro. I pay deepseek by token count, and honestly I added $20 and it just keeps going, hardly burning anything.

[pimeys]

I use V4 flash as my personal agent. It categorizes documents, organizes my calendar, searches information etc. for pennies. Amazing model.

Not very good for programming though.

[UncleOxidant]

I'm on the Z.ai quarterly subscription plan (got in when the price was lower) and I was using it through opencode and it was like I'd only get maybe an hour of usage (if that, sometimes) before it would time out and say come back in 5 hours. Now I'm using it through their Zcode harness and I rarely hit that - they say they're giving 1.5x usage if you use it through Zcode, sometimes seems like even more than that.

[esafak]

Too bad Zcode sucks. The promo ends this month anyway.

[KronisLV]

> I've yet to find a way to run it on a monthly sub reliably for cheaper than Codex.

Matches my experience, I got their Pro subscription and while I enjoyed the model itself a lot and while their ZCode harness is also pretty nice, it gave me less tokens for similar amounts of money that Anthropic would give me on a subscription: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model...

I'm yet to try out Kimi, but if their subscription were to be anywhere comparable to Anthropic/OpenAI, I might just switch over because competition is good.

DeepSeek V4 Pro is really affordable per-token but regularly kept making mistakes in the tasks I gave it. I mean I could at least afford the tokens to go over the work a 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th time and gradually fix most of the issues, but it was a very frustrating mode of work.

[stavros]

I don't know, DeepseekV4 is so dirt cheap that it makes lots of sense to use over Sonnet.

[mark_l_watson]

re:

> Right now unless you're paying by the token, there's no cost based reason to use the open weight models for daily coding work because the monthly coding plans from Anthropic and OpenAI are a better deal.

Maybe. I am on a $20/month Anthropic subscription this month but I also use Claude Code frequently with Deepseek v4 flash and pro, GML5.2. For simple work Deepseek v4 flash is so nice because it is fast.

What you say is true however, the US hyper-scalers are still (desperately?) subsidizing subscriptions for market share to boost there valuations.

I really want to see AI inference costs approach zero, and I think I just need to wait a few years to see that.

[cmrdporcupine]

DeepSeek is a whole other story. It and a few others are quite economical. But they're also not nearly at the same level.

I can get by working on code strictly in GLM. I can't with DeepSeek. It makes some pretty careless mistakes and isn't a very deep thinker.

It is very useful as a general purpose model for non-coding purposes though.

[humanfromearth9]

For maths, it's also wrong most of the time. Generated stuff looks right, then let Opus audit and see the disaster.

DS4 is usable iff you have a way to test the generated stuff, and to convince yourself that its production is right. With successive review-fix rounds, it's obviously way more reliable too, but that can't compensate for it's lack of rigor when reasoning. It's very smart but neither rigorous nor careful. And that is a direct result of its architecture.

[ifwinterco]

I found this with kimi k2.7 as well: on paper it should be quite cheap, but it's not because it uses a lot of tokens for quite simple tasks

[tokai]

Compared to the flagship models GLM is still a 1/10th the price on the task I have tested.

[cmrdporcupine]

Only if you're paying for said flagship models through API prices. Which I specifically said I was not and specifically mentioned coding plans.