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points by creativeSlumber 2 days ago | 0 comments

> But Anthropic's business practices are scary. They have a reputation for cancelling accounts for random reasons, offer rather bad terms, and have no customer support. I have a strong aversion to services with a reputation for cancelling services arbitrarily. They will apparently cancel based on their system's guesses as to what you're working on. Sometimes they guess wrong. What I'm doing (metaverse clients) is so far out of the mainstream they may guess wrong.

Then use open alternatives as much as possible. Something like Opencode with OpenRouter with Deepseek 4.1 from ZDR provider works very well and costs like 1/20th.

[–] scosman 2 days ago

It costs 1/20th the price at token pricing, but an Ultra subscription is still amazing value.

[–] bloppe 2 days ago

I also think OAI is much better than Anthropic in this regard. They don't try to gatekeep nearly as much.

But I agree that open alternatives are sort of a theoretical ideal. Just a lot harder to get those mega-subsidized.

[–] jpardoe 2 days ago

In practice all of these open models are more expensive than a Claude subscription.

[–] ggregoire 2 days ago

Are they? (genuine question, i've got no experience with Claude) This month I used 1 billion tokens (including cache) with DS4.1 flash and it cost me 7% of my $10 opencode go sub.

If you meant in developer time, then I don't know but it seems very fast to me (rarely thinks more than ~10sec, never more than ~30sec) and usually oneshots what I prompt it to do. I use opencode tui as harness.

[–] jpardoe 1 day ago

In my experience yes. Been using Claude since day one and wanted to experiment with Pi for fun, and try to get my costs down. I found the open models more expensive, eventually had to plug my Pi set up into an OpenAI subscription, that was the only way to get good value… Then I realised OpenAI is way behind Opus 5.5 and their subscription is far less generous with usage, so I’ve come full circle and am back on Claude Code.

[–] jeffyaw 2 days ago

i found they were until recently. mimo 2.6 flash and glm 5.3 flash seem to finally be cheaper. i find ds4.1 flash still on the high side.

[–] jpardoe 1 day ago

I found GLM Flash competitive price wise but then my tasks took twice as long to complete. Even if it was cheaper (in my experience it still wasn’t) you then lose out on speed because of the insane amounts of inefficient reasoning.