Ask HN: What is the best bang for buck budget AI coding?
1 points
1 hour ago
| 2 comments
| HN
Hi. Poor developer here.

I'm trying to learn AI coding (already have multiple years experience with "normal" programming in various languages.) I want to know how to make my budget (about $30/month) go furthest.

At the moment, I am using:

Z.ai $6/month plan:

Ok model (GLM 4.7) It seems to rate limit/throttle aggressively if I use it a lot.

and

Github copilot $10/month plan:

Seems to reduce model context to 100k tokens, and only offers unlimited access to smaller model (GPT5-mini, Grok Code Fast 1 etc). These models are ok for making precise edits to specific code, but they seem to get stuck when the program is large and has a lot of concurrency etc.

I also have free plans for web/mobile-chat for every model I can find.

I only have older computers, so editors like Cursor or Antigravity are too slow to be usable. So I prefer something that can work with a CLI (opencode preferably).

Do I already have the best deal? Or is there something I am missing. When I try to compare plans, it is confusing and they are not often clear about actual usage limits.

Are Codex or Claude even options at this price point if I want to code for multiple hours per day?

everlier
1 hour ago
[-]
Most of these tools work with OpenAI-compatible APIs, register for OpenRouter, top up your account for $10 one time to avoid rate limits and use free models that are always there in one way or another.
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verdverm
1 hour ago
[-]
Claude at $20 / month? I hear it runs out pretty quick though

tl;dr - you get what you pay for

I pay by the token via VertexAi, better than those budget plans that rate limit you

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