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I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best.

For general use, I personally don’t see much justification as to why I would want to pay a per-token fee just to not create a few accounts with my trusted providers and add them to an instance for users. It is transparent to users beyond them having a single internal API key (or multiple if you want to track specific app usage) for all the models they have access to, with limits and logging. They wouldn’t even need to know what provider is hosting the model and the underlying provider could be swapped without users knowing.

It is certainly easier to pay a fee per token on a small scale and not have to run an instance, so less technical users could definitely find advantage in just sticking with OpenRouter.

Love openrouter I can use cheap models without having to have an api at a bunch of different providers and can use the expensive models when im in a pinch and am maxed out from claude or codex

well worth the 5% they take

I love Openrouter. The ability to define presets, and the ease of access is well worth the few vs. juggling lots of providers separately. I maintain a few subscriptions too - including the most expensive Claude subscription - but Openrouter handles the rest for me.

Expect you don't have the right to do what you want with the API Key (see waves of ban lately, many SaaS services have closed because of it).

I actually find Zed pretty reasonable in terms of memory usage. But yeah, like you say, there are lots of small UX/DX papercuts that are just unfortunate. In some cases I'm not sure it's even Zed's fault, it's just years and years of expecting things to work a certain way because of VS Code and they work differently in Zed.

Eg: Ctrl+P "Open Fol.." in Zed does not surface "Opening a Folder". Zed doesn't call them folders. You have to know that's called "Workspace". And even then, if you type "Open Work..." it doesn't surface! You have to purposefully start with "work..."

QoL features is where WebStorm shines! I don't look forward to when I have to open vscode instead sometimes.

Just the floating and ephemeral "Search in files" modal in Jetbrain IDEs would convince me to switch from any other IDE.

I have 4-5 typescript projects and one python opened in Zed at any given time (with a bunch of LSPs, ACPs, opened terminals, etc.) and I see around 1.2 - 1.4gb usage.

I opened just one of the typescript projects inside VSCode and I see something like 1gb (combining the helpers usage). I'm not using it actively, so no extra plugins and so on.

That's on mac, so I guess it may vary on other systems.

I think there’s a bug? It used to be memory efficient and now I periodically notice it explodes. Quit and restart fixes it

I don’t have any extensions installed and I’m basically leaving it open, idle, as a note scratch space. I do have projects open with many files but not many actual files are open

Anyway idk

Same here: I found the multibuffers feature really useful, but the extension system really couldn't hold a candle to VS Code at the time of my testing

Spent a couple of hours trying to make the Svelte extension ignore a particular type of false positive CSS error, failed, and returned to VS Code

Will definitely give it another chance when the extension system is more mature though!

> I easily get $1K+ of usage out of my $100 max sub. And that's with Opus 4.6 on high thinking.

And people keep claiming the token providers are running inference at a profit.

Yeah — I just created an anthropic API key to experiment with pi, and managed to spend $1 in about 30 minutes doing some basic work with Sonnet.

Extrapolating that out, the subscription pricing is HEAVILY subsidized. For similar work in Claude Code, I use a Pro plan for $20/month, and rarely bang up against the limits.

Some of the newer models available on OpenRouter are good, but I agree that none of them are a replacement for Opus 4.6 for coding.

If you're trying to minimize cost then having one of the inexpensive models do exploratory work and simple tasks while going back to Opus for the serious thinking and review is a good hybrid model. Having the $20/month Claude plan available is a good idea even if you're primarily using OpenRouter available models.

I think trying to use anything other than the best available SOTA model for important work is not a good tradeoff, though.

Not everyone is just vibecoding everything and relying on agents running sota models to do anything tho.

Its really fantastic. I can't imagine why you'd go through the effort using Claude Code with other models when pi is a much better harness. There's tons of extensions already available, and its trivial to prompt an LLM to create your any new extension you want. Lacking creativity and want something from another harness?

> Run <other harness> in tmux and interrogate it how feature X works, then build me the equivalent as a pi extension.

Maybe in a few years there will be obvious patterns with harnesses having built really optimal flows, but right now it works so much better to experiment and try new approaches and prompts and flows, and pi is the easiest one to tweak and make it your own.

Yes, it's super cool. Check Mario's latest talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dli5slNaJu0 Armin also has some videos covering it on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArminRonacher/ Pi's Discord is still nice, even though it was a bit flooded after the openclaw thing.

Pi is a lot simpler than Claude and a lot more transparent in how it operates.

It's designed to be a small simple core with a rich API which you can use for extensions (providing skills, tools, or just modifying/extending the agent's behaviour).

It's likely that you'll eventually need to find extensions for some extended functionality, but for each feature you can pick the one that fits your need exactly (or just use Pi to hack a new extension).

I really love it. The simplicity is key. The first play project I made with it was a public transport map with GTFS data - click on a stop and get the routes and the timetables for the stop and the surrounding ones. I used Qwen3.5-35B on Mac M1 Max with oMLX. It wrote 98% of the code with very little interaction from me. And very useful is the /tree feature to go back in history when the model is on a wrong track or my instructions where not good enough. I usually work in a two path approach: first let the model explore what it needs to fulfill the task and write it into CONTEXT.md (or any other name to your liking). Then restart the session with the CONTEXT.md. That way you are always nicely operating in 5-15k context, i.e. all is very fast. Create an account for pi (or docker) and make sure it can't walk into other directories - it has bash access. Add the browser-tools to the skills and load them when useful: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-skills

No need for database MCP, I use postgres and tell it to use psql.

Occasionally I use prettier to remove indentation - the LLM makes a lot less edit errors that way. Just add the indent back before you commit. Or tell pi to do it.

had been using claude max/opus with pi and the results have been incredible. Having pi write an AGENTS.md and dip your feet into creating your own skills specific to the project.

With the anthropic billing change (not being able to use the max credits for pi) I think I have to cancel - as I'm whirring through credits now.

Going to move to the $250/mo OpenAI codex plan for now.

I use Daniel Meissler’s PAI and it’s been an incredible harness.

i really have been enjoying pi a lot

at first i thought i was goring to build lots of extra plugins and commands but what ended up working for me is:

- i have a simpel command that pulls context from a linear issue

- simple review command

- project specific skills for common tasks

Reluctantly, the dev seems to have a stinky attitude.

He went on an "OSS vacation", which is perfectly reasonable and said he'd be back on a certain date. I had a PR open for a trivial fix, someone asked when it would land. I shared he was still away. After his return I politely asked, "@badlogic hey, what can we do to progress this? Thanks x"

I then got what I would consider an abusive reply, because he confused me with someone else. In the meantime he extended his vacation. Didn't even think his shitty attitude was worthy of an apology, that HE confused me with someone else.

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/discussions/1475#discuss...

And another other thing I fixed with no attribution, just landed it himself separately. https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/discussions/1080

and

https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/issues/1079#event-223896...

Now he's seemingly marked anything with my name on as a "clanker", despite all my changes being by hand.

I've been around open source enough to have a thick skin, but when i'm doing something "for fun" and someone treats you like that, i'd rather avoid it as far as possible. I certainly could not in good faith use this project for anything work related.

Interesting. I've always been turned off by how vague the descriptions of Ollama's limits are for their paid tiers. What sort of work have you been doing with it?

yeah? why do you like that over using GLM5 in a VPS that charges by token use? $20 still cheaper and seamless to set up? how are the tokens per second?

How much did it cost for how long?

I dislike how Zen (and many similar cases, not picking on Zen here) report being not for profit or transparent, while the auto-recharge mechanism guarantees they are sitting on a float of at least $5 per account, and presumably an average of at least $10. That's something like 50 cents of interest income per year per account. It's not nothing and it's hardly egregious fraud, but I feel if they will do this when it's obvious what they're doing, what other corners might they cut

Honesty as a marketing strategy is really undervalued in cases like this

How does Claude Code compare to OpenCode Zen? I’m on the $20/month Claude plan, and was considering OpenCode Zen as well.

Due to the quota changes, I actually find myself using Claude less and less

I'm still paying the 10$ GH copilot but I don't use it because :

  - context is aggressively trimmed compared to CC obviously for cost saving reasons, so the performance is worse
  - the request pricing model forces me to adjust how I work

I like the VSCode integration and the MCP/LSP usage surprised me sometimes over the dumb grep from CC. Ironically VSCode is becoming my terminal emulator of choice for all the CLI agents - SSH/container access and the automatic port mapping, etc. - it's more convenient than tmux sessions for me. So Copilot would be ideal for me but yeah it's just tweaked for being budget/broad scope tool rather than a tool for professionals that would pay to get work done.

Is your source code worth only $40 for them to train their models on?

https://www.techradar.com/pro/bad-news-skeptics-github-says-...

Google $20/mo plan has great usage for Claude Opus. Last time I used it, around Feb, it felt basically unlimited.

I don't quite understand what you mean by something is up. Was the reason around security/telemetry or similar?

OpenRouter accepts crypto for payments. That should have raised some flags with banks.

You are absolutely allowed to expose access to end users, as long as you continue to abide by terms of service. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of apps built on openrouter that in turn have end users of their own. We showcase many of them on our /apps ranking page!

> Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend

The new gimped claude code limits means my claude code spend the last month is $131. It cost me $20. I did an additional spend $5 on extra usage which cost me $5.

While VC's are setting fire to money I am going to warm my hands.

I ran this just now and for a small web-app I built I used over $50 in a single day. This was using superpowers plugin and almost exclusively coordinating through Opus. Could I get by with 100$ a month without the subscription? Maybe, but I pay for the convenience of just being able to throw Opus with lavish plugins at it (with 5h limits that are, in my opinion, pretty reasonable). I don't really WANT to have to think about when Haiku or Sonnet are enough.

If anything I would consider switching to OpenAI subscription (if I didn't despise them even more than Anthropic as a company), but converting to API use seems completely infeasible to me. I'd have to severely cut back on my use for not much benefit, other than having maybe an agent thats a little less jank than CC.

I'm always interested in how people use tools. I like to have a full editor to review code as a complement to the CLI and as I don't often use hooks the integration is also good enough for me.

1. What do you use the hooks for?

2. Do you use an editor alongside the CLI to review code or only examine the diffs?

Sounds like a good way to get your google account banned

Sorry can you expand on that? I have a Gemini subscription from a Google pro account but never used it much. I can use it with Claude Code?? Hmm. I’ll look it up. Thanks!

COO of OpenRouter here. Thats right — we haven’t done it to date but we can’t have unlimited liabilities stacking up forever. At some point we will start expiring credits from accounts that have seen zero activity in over a year.

You are absolutely correct, I was not aware of this. I will update the article accordingly and perhaps it's more worthwhile to stay solely on Cursor with the limited models.

Sadly Zed seems to add 10% so it's still more worthwhile to use OpenRouter.

Yep, I was comparing opencode go ($10/month) with copilot pro ($10/month) this morning.

opencode go gives about 14x the requests of copilot pro. I was like, there must be something not right.

Then I compared the best model GLM5.1 on opencode go, and antropic opus 4.6, yes opus is better on most benchmarks, but glm 5.1 is not too far behind.

$200 for Claude, $50 to Open AI, and maybe $100 for Openrouter, and a second Claude account paid by a client... Likely to increase.

It easily pays for itself 10x over.

When you consider the cross section of the tech community posting on HN, is it really that surprising?

It’s mad for sure, but I’d bet 99.9% of people spending money on AI aren’t spending their own hard earned sooo… “YOLO it’s a business expense/investment”…

I had a similar opinion a couple of years ago, content with more of an autocomplete.

Now I'm happy with agents as the models and harnesses have improved significantly but the token usage comes at a cost.

some are spending 100/day or even 1000/day. they must really be mad :)

To get the equivalent of a junior developer that would cost $80,000/yr + benefits?