Re:Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and Open...
by eshack94 on Thursday April 09, 2026 @09:35PM
(#47712520)
I've been thinking of doing this — using one of the "pretty good but not Opus 4.6-good, YET very cheap" models for the implementation part of more basic code features, AFTER first using Opus 4.6 high for the planning stage.
Do you think this would be a decent approach?
Also, which client would I use for this? OpenCode? I don't think Claude Code supports using other models. Thoughts?
Re:Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and Open...
by submain on Thursday April 09, 2026 @10:55PM
(#47713068)
I have been doing this and the results have been fairly good.
I use claude to build requirements.md -> implementation.md -> todo.md. Then I tell opencode + openrouter to read those files and follow the todo using a cheap (many times free) model.
It works 90% of the time. The other 10% it will get stuck, in which case I revert to claude.
That has allowed me to stay on the $20/month claude subscription as opposed to the $100.
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.