I started with Claude Code, realized it was too much money for every message, then switched to Gemini CLI, then Qwen. Probably Claude Code is better, but I don't need it since I can solve my problems without it.
I've found the regular Claude Pro subscription quite enough for coding tasks when you anyway have a bunch of other things like code reviews to do in addition to coding, and won't spend the whole day running it.
Yeah I was using openrouter for Claude code and burned through $30 in credits to do things that if I had just used the openrouter chat for it would have been like $1.50, I decided it was better for now to do the extra “secretary work” of manual entry and context management of the chat and pain of attaching files. It was pretty disappointing because at first I had assumed it would not be much different in price at all.
This is an interesting way to look at it because you can kind of quantify the tradeoff in terms of the value of your time. A simple analysis would be something like, if you value your time at $60/hour, then spending an additional $30 in credits becomes a good choice if it saves you more than a half-hour of work.
Try what I've done: use the Claude Code tool but point your ANTHROPIC_URL at a DeepSeek API membership. It's like 1/10th the cost, and about 2/3rds the intelligence.
Also there is a fixed price Claude Code plan for GLM 4.6 from z.ai, I pay for the cheapest ($6/mo) as an alternate/fallback for Claude Code and Codex. I've been surprised by how similar in capabilities all three of them are, definitely not seeing a big CLI agent moat...
GLM is maybe slightly weaker on average but on the other hand it's also solved problems where both CC and Codex got stuck in endless failure loops so for the price it's nice to have in my back pocket. I also see some tool use failures sometimes that it always works around which I'm guessing are due to slight differences with Claude.
Gemini and it's tooling is absolute shit. The LLM itself is barely usable and needs so much supervision you might as well do the work yourself. Then couple that with an awful cli and vscode interface and you'll find that it's just a complete waste of time.
Compared to the anthropic offering is night and day. Claude gets on with the job and makes me way more productive.
It's probably a mix of what you're working on and how you're using the tool. If you can't get it done for free or cheaply, it makes sense to pay. I first design the architecture in my mind, then use Grok 4 fast (free) for single-shot generation of main files. This forces me to think first, and read the generated code to double-check. Then, the CLI is mostly for editing, clerical work, testing, etc. That said, I do try to avoid coding altogether if the CLI + MCP servers + MD files can solve the problem.
Which model were you using? In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro is just as good as Claude Sonnet 4 and 4.5. It's literally what I use as a fallback to wrap something up if I hit the 5 hour limit on Claude and want to just push past some incomplete work.
I'm just going to throw this out there. I get good results from a truly trash model like gpt-oss-20b (quantized at 4bits). The reason I can literally use this model is because I know my shit and have spent time learning how much instruction each model I use needs.
Would be curious what you're actually having issues with if you're willing to share.
I share the same opinion on Gemini cli. Other than for simplest tasks it is just not usable, it gets stuck in loops, ignores instructions, fails to edit files. Plus it just has a plenty of bugs in the cli that you occasionally hit.
I wish I could use it rather than pay an extra subscription for Claude Code, but it is just in a different league (at least as recently as couple of weeks ago)
I started with Claude Code, realized it was too much money for every message, then switched to Gemini CLI, then Qwen. Probably Claude Code is better, but I don't need it since I can solve my problems without it.
I've found the regular Claude Pro subscription quite enough for coding tasks when you anyway have a bunch of other things like code reviews to do in addition to coding, and won't spend the whole day running it.
Yeah I was using openrouter for Claude code and burned through $30 in credits to do things that if I had just used the openrouter chat for it would have been like $1.50, I decided it was better for now to do the extra “secretary work” of manual entry and context management of the chat and pain of attaching files. It was pretty disappointing because at first I had assumed it would not be much different in price at all.
This is an interesting way to look at it because you can kind of quantify the tradeoff in terms of the value of your time. A simple analysis would be something like, if you value your time at $60/hour, then spending an additional $30 in credits becomes a good choice if it saves you more than a half-hour of work.
Try what I've done: use the Claude Code tool but point your ANTHROPIC_URL at a DeepSeek API membership. It's like 1/10th the cost, and about 2/3rds the intelligence.
Sometimes I can't really tell.
Also there is a fixed price Claude Code plan for GLM 4.6 from z.ai, I pay for the cheapest ($6/mo) as an alternate/fallback for Claude Code and Codex. I've been surprised by how similar in capabilities all three of them are, definitely not seeing a big CLI agent moat...
GLM is maybe slightly weaker on average but on the other hand it's also solved problems where both CC and Codex got stuck in endless failure loops so for the price it's nice to have in my back pocket. I also see some tool use failures sometimes that it always works around which I'm guessing are due to slight differences with Claude.
https://z.ai/subscribe
I use this to proxy ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to other models: https://github.com/ujisati/claude-code-provider-proxy
unfortunately it doesn't support local models but they're too slow for coding anyway.
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Or a 3rd party service like https://synthetic.new, of which I am an unaffiliated user.
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Not great.
It's ok for documentation or small tasks, but consistently fails at tasks that both Claude or Codex succeed at.
Gemini and it's tooling is absolute shit. The LLM itself is barely usable and needs so much supervision you might as well do the work yourself. Then couple that with an awful cli and vscode interface and you'll find that it's just a complete waste of time.
Compared to the anthropic offering is night and day. Claude gets on with the job and makes me way more productive.
It's probably a mix of what you're working on and how you're using the tool. If you can't get it done for free or cheaply, it makes sense to pay. I first design the architecture in my mind, then use Grok 4 fast (free) for single-shot generation of main files. This forces me to think first, and read the generated code to double-check. Then, the CLI is mostly for editing, clerical work, testing, etc. That said, I do try to avoid coding altogether if the CLI + MCP servers + MD files can solve the problem.
> Gemini and it's tooling is absolute shit.
Which model were you using? In my experience Gemini 2.5 Pro is just as good as Claude Sonnet 4 and 4.5. It's literally what I use as a fallback to wrap something up if I hit the 5 hour limit on Claude and want to just push past some incomplete work.
I'm just going to throw this out there. I get good results from a truly trash model like gpt-oss-20b (quantized at 4bits). The reason I can literally use this model is because I know my shit and have spent time learning how much instruction each model I use needs.
Would be curious what you're actually having issues with if you're willing to share.
I share the same opinion on Gemini cli. Other than for simplest tasks it is just not usable, it gets stuck in loops, ignores instructions, fails to edit files. Plus it just has a plenty of bugs in the cli that you occasionally hit. I wish I could use it rather than pay an extra subscription for Claude Code, but it is just in a different league (at least as recently as couple of weeks ago)
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I think you must be using it quite differently to me.
I can one-shot new webapps in Claude and Codex and can't in Gemini Pro.
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