Hi, student here, am working on projects where i am building, benchmarking, testing, deploying, creating scripts for auto deployment and testing etc. Been using Chatgpt Plus+ (cant afford higher tier subscription). Opus didn’t work out for me cause of worst usage limits. So presently am on a cycle of building one application in a week, than wait for next reset, to deploy/test/bench whereas i want to work on multiple stuff. I tried using cheaper models like luna as well as deepseek v4 flash and they just fall apart on this kind of work. so therefore am looking at Cursor, Qwen Token Plan (Qwen3.8-Max), GLM Coding Plan (GLM-5.3), Kimi Code (Kimi K3), or OpenCode Go,all around $20/mo. Tried GLM and Kimi myself, both decent, GLM looking promising. Qwen3.8-Max is average but works when i provide enough context on what to look for and how to do stuff. So my Main hurdle is figuring out which of these subscription plan provide generous usage of their frontier model. If anyone has experience with all these subscriptions would love your input on this. Or is what I’m asking for even realistic on a $20/mo plan, or is a higher tier subscription just the only real answer here? Also another thought would it make more sense to self-host something like Qwen 3.8B/27B run it in loops in a sandboxed test environment. working on all the issues or testing deployment scripts etc. And on success call a SOTA model to evaluate the work done (i can even use deepseek v4 flash from opencode hence the mention of this plan) TLDR: which of Qwen/GLM/Kimi/OpenCode gives the most frontier usage per $ for working on deployment/testing/benchmarking etc, and is self-hosting a small model/use opencode deepseek v4 flash + SOTA verification loop a better viable move? submitted by /u/hapless_pants
Originally posted by u/hapless_pants on r/ArtificialInteligence