I tried several times . It is no match in my personal experience with Claude models . There’s almost no place for second spot from my point of view . You are doing things for work each bug is hours of work, potentially lost customer etc . Why would you trust your money … just to back up ?

I'm using it for my own stuff and I'm definitely not dropping however much it costs for the Claude Max plans.

That's why I usually use Claude for planning, feed the issues to beads or a markdown file and then have Codex or Crush+GLM implement them.

For exploratory stuff I'm "pair-programming" with Claude.

At work we have all the toys, but I'm not putting my own code through them =)

it's beyond me, why do you need Max plans? I use Opus/Sonnet/Gemini,GPT 5.2 every day in cursor and I'm not paying Claude Max.

I'm mostly just coding at night after the family goes to bed and even I can hit Claude Pro limits - and I started AI assisted programming when we didn't have monthly plans and I had to pay every token out of my own pocket.

I learned to be pretty efficient with token use after the first bill dropped :D

It's a perfectly serviceable fallback when Claude Code kicks me off in the middle of an edit on the Pro plan (which happens constantly to me now) and I just want to finish tweaking some CSS styles or whatever to wrap up. If you have a legitimate concern about losing customers than yes, you're probably in the wrong target market for a $3/mo plan...

you can have a $20 usd /mo cursor with cutting edge models, and pay per use for extra use when you need per token, most of the time you will be ok within basic cursor plans, and you don't need to stick with one vendor. Today Claude is good , awesome ,tomorrow google is good - great.

I sometimes even ask several models to see what suggestion is best, or even mix two. Epcecially during bugfixes.

Openrouter with OpenCode.

I've gone down that route already with Roo/Kilo Code and then OpenCode, but OpenCode with the z.ai backend and/or the CC z.ai Anthropic compatible endpoint although I've been moving to OC in general more and more over time.

GLM 4.6 with Z.ai plan (haven't tried 4.7 yet) has worked well enough for straightforward changes with a relatively large quota (more generous than CC which only gets more frustrating on the Pro plan over time) and has predictable billing which is a big pro for me. I just got tired of having to police my OpenRouter usage to avoid burning through my credits.

But yes, OpenCode is awesome particularly as it supports all the subscriptions I have access to via personal or work (Github Copilot/CC/z.ai). And as model churn/competition slows down over time I can stick which whichever end up having the best value/performance with sufficient quota for my personal projects without fear of lock-in and enshittification.

There is a free tier for GLM 4.7 with OpenCode Zen. Think the cost is pretty reasonable for all apart from Anthropic.

> I tried several times

Did you try the new GLM 4.7 or the older models?

GLM 4.6 was kind of meh. Especially on Claude code since thinking was seemingly entirely broken. This week I've been playing with 4.7 and it seems like massive improvement, subjective pretty much almost at Sonnet level (it's still using a lot less thinking tokens, though).

I shifted from Crush to Opencode this week because Crush doesn't seem to be evolving in its utility; having a plan mode, subagents etc seems to not be a thing they're working on at the mo.

I'd love to hear your insight though, because maybe I just configured things wrong haha

I can't understand why every CLI tool doesn't have Plan mode already, it should be table stakes to make sure I can just ask questions or have a model do code reviews without having to worry about it rushing into implementation headlong.

Looking at you, Gemini CLI.

this doesn’t mean much if you hit daily limits quickly anyway. So the API pricing matters more

TBH when I hit the Claude daily limit I just take that as a sign to go outside (or go to bed, depending on the time).

If the project management is on point, it really doesn't matter. Unfinished tasks stay as is, if something is unfinished in the context I leave the terminal open and come back some time later, type "continue", hit enter and go away.