Hey everyone, I’ve been thinking about changing my entire AI workflow and wanted to get some opinions from people who might have already tried this. My usage pattern is very “spiky.” Some days I’m coding or writing constantly and live inside the chat, hitting usage limits and needing multiple models. Other days, I don’t touch an AI at all. Because of this, sticking to a fixed monthly subscription (like the Gemini plan I was on) started to feel like a trap. I felt like I was paying for days I wasn’t using it, which is honestly annoying. I recently discovered Cherry Studio as a desktop client, and the idea of connecting it to OpenRouter (or Groq/direct APIs) is really appealing to me. It looks like a “bring your own model” buffet where I can just grab whatever model I need, DeepSeek, Llama, Claude, for that specific task and only pay for the tokens I actually use. Has anyone here fully committed to this setup? Does it make sense financially and UX-wise compared to just paying the flat $20/month fee to the big providers? Am I overcomplicating things, or is this the smartest way to go for a sporadic user? submitted by /u/Foxtor
Originally posted by u/Foxtor on r/ArtificialInteligence
You could stand up something locally and bring your SaaS costs to almost $0
I use librechat with a bunch of API keys (openAI, anthropic, Gemini) and let’s me do pay as you go for a lot of models. That’s cool because it let’s you switch between models miss conversation, fork conversations, etc.