I’m not saying you’re wrong (I have no experience), but wouldn’t it be useful to test this model out for yourself before passing judgment on it?

Since you've volunteered as tribute, give it a shot and let us know if the quota has improved.

As tribute, I bit the bullet on the $40 plan to test out K3.1 Pro.

Still burning through the 5-hour rate limit way too quickly, though. Output quality seems solid enough, but the value will probably make a lot more sense via API pricing for smaller projects.

My current tier list based on what I’ve been testing:

1. Opus 5.5

2. Astra

3. Argon

4. Kimi K3.1 Pro

(For lightweight/daily driver tasks, Gemini Flash 3.8, DeepSeek Flash, and Luna are still up there as favorites.)

In my experience, the difference between your 1 & 2, and your 2 & 3 are huge, and I don't find Argon to be usable for any big tasks because it really does a big mess every now and then (which Astra also does but much less frequently and not in a "I just implemented something else with unusable code" way), and Placing Kimi after it seems like a very low evaluation.

I had the lowest plan ($20/month I think) and it literally gave me fifteen, maybe twenty minutes tops, using the cheaper K3-256K variant. Basically enough to fill the context about 1.2x and that was it.

It's a really smart model but way too expensive. The same $20 goes 100x further with Claude. I used it for the initial task planning while the plan didn't expire, then handed off to DeepSeek or Minimax.

Same plan, just asked it to review a repo that Fable has been helping out with (max plan, haven't run out of the hourly or weekly limit once yet, and I use the same sub on multiple projects at once). Kimi didn't even finish the scan, ran out of the 5hr budget in less than 10 minutes. Unusable, unfortunately.

Gee I wonder why 20 dollars goes further. My harness tracks my spend with codex and I think its doable to spend 20 dollars daily on the 20 dollar plan. Maybe this is a good canary on the feasibility of all this.

Companies which are ok losing $80 billion in Q1 and Q2 can do that.

Source?

Please don't link to Anthropic's $80b loss due to stock based borrowing.

That is surprising. I had a $200 sub when K3 came out and at the time there was no 5h limit, making the subscription really good for running 4-5 big tasks each month.

What's the best bang for the buck ≈$10–20 (per-month/equivalent) subscription for a good enough model these days?

I've tried a few, best so far: DeepSeek API credits.

- OpenCode Go $10: I feel like most of the models are lower quality than directly from the provider. If you ignore my "vibes": the value is very good for e.g. DeepSeek 4.1 Flash (not sure if they're serving 1017 yet), GLM 5.3 Flash, Qwen3.8 Flash and Claude Haiku 5.5.

- Z.AI: Tried the $18/month plan and was disappointed by the usage limits. Even with GLM 5.3 Flash I ran into the 5h limit pretty quickly.

- OpenAI: I tried the $20 plan and $100 plan. $20 ran into 5h limits very quickly with anything other than Luna models. $100 felt like pretty good value for GPT 6.1 Sol, but as others frequently repeat: it's probably heavily subsidized and won't be around forever.

- DeepSeek API credits: I can let a single agent run all day (and not worry about keeping the context small) and am usually around $1 usage for the day. Flash 4.1 1017 is also a very good model IMO. For the stuff I've used it with it hasn't felt any worse than GPT 6.1 Sol. The benefit of API credits is also that they don't expire at the end of the month (like unused subscription usage).

- I haven't tried any of Anthropic's subs, but my guess is you can get a lot of Claude Haiku 5.5 usage out of the $20 plan which is definitely a good model. I'm just not a huge fan of Anthropic or Claude Code, so I haven't tried it.

You can even run Sonnet 6.1 on a daily basis for $20. You just have to take some weekends off. After the Deepseek price increase, I run 95% Sonnet, and 5% kimi.

Sonnet 6.1?!

Sorry, mixed it up with Sol. Sonnet 5.5 of course, then Sol 6.1.

Sonnet

Anthropic subscription, no question. Although the best bang for the buck I'd the 90 EUR a month thing. (I suppose it may cost $100).

It depends on how you use your subscription. If you are "vibe coding" and spinning up a lot of subagents in parallel, a $10-20 subscription won't be enough. If you usually open one or two terminals at a time, and use it like you are peer programming with it, then Anthropic (Opus 5.5) or OpenAI (Sol 6.1) are the best $20 subscriptions.

I don't think anything compares to Anthropic's plans. You still won't get much mileage out of the $20 plan, but it feels like it's 5x as much as other $20 plans.

The Max 20x plan is incredible value. I am able to burn something like $2k in tokens each week without consuming any credits.

I've been getting by on the Claude 20 a month plan for nearly a year but Opus 5.5 is so productive for me that I'm getting more done than before and still want to upgrade.

20$ chatgpt plus sub with pi harness and a few api credits in openrouter.sometiemd I use sol for planing and glm flash for implementation bu

For coding or what?

For general purpose LLM, you can't beat Gemini AI Pro. It's $200/year and you can add your whole household.

I've had Gemini AI pro since last December and honestly (apart from nano banana) the biggest pluses for me are the addons, the google drive space, less ads on youtube, more nano banana, more veo in flow. However Argon is interesting. Don't like the split between the chat window and antigravity currently though.

I’m not sure who this plan is for honestly, for general purpose LLMs in the Gemini-quality-tier how are you using enough tokens to justify $200 / month over just using deepseek over openrouter? And if you need a more capable model than that, like Gemini 4 argon, why not get a Claude subscription? Maybe the family sharing parts make it worth it?

$200...PER YEAR.

Gemini Pro IMO

Opencode go with DeepSeek is endless and hard to max out for 10 dollars. ChatGPT Sol 5 hour window is limiting but they keep resetting the weekly budget I haven't had a chance to use my monthly reset and it's a better model compared to deepseek. Claude gets used up quickly. Grok is okay but it's image generating has become the worst.

If you need endless calls opencode go is the best. If you want a model you can trust more that can generate images use ChatGPT.

I have open go and chatgpt personal subscriptions and use Claude at work where I often spent $200 a day.

I guess the question is what do you want to do with it? Ive had subscriptions to Claude and Gemini since December and had a couple of months of Chatgpt but have cancelled that. As an all-rounder I'm extremely happy with Opus 5.5. If you had a narrower use case i suspect you can get more/cheaper from a chinese API.

same. bought the annual plan, second largest one, in around February to lock in the price. well, what did they do, cut quota by 80% when K2.7 launched and then even further when K3 and K3.1 launched.

I used Kimi 2 (or 2.5) with my Openclaw and enjoyed it there so took out a subscription to Kimi 3.0 when it came out. Found it functional but boring. Preferred Qwen. Am not going to try the latest Kimi but it seems to be giving patchy results.