Comment by abalashov
2 days ago
I've been using Kimi for coding tasks for close to six months now, and haven't looked back. I'll periodically try something on Claude to make sure I'm not missing anything, but I've been very happy.
I just do the OpenRouter thing. My use of LLMs is narrow enough that cost is a negligible consideration either way.
Curious: On which plan? In my experience, their $20 plan is super inadequate as a daily driver (ditto for Qwen's $30/mo), though given K3, I'm tempted to trial $49/mo or $99/mo.
I just pay metered usage via OpenRouter. I've spent no more than $10-$20/mo, but my usage is, by the standards of so-called "agentic coding" these days, very light and confined.
I doubt my workflows match the profile of "daily driver" as you're conceiving of it. I'm mostly in the IDE chat box asking for a hand here and there, but no "long horizon" / big vision / architecture things. Occasionally, I'll solicit a general opinion, quite abstractly, which isn't very token-intensive. My contexts are tiny and I aim to keep them that way.
The only token-intensive thing I do is occasional analyses of open-source codebases along the lines of "what is the actual behaviour when message X comes in and is malformed like this?", or something else similarly far-reaching. For that, I use DeepSeek's Reasonix, which they savvily dropped at the exact moment the sting of Claude API pricing became a sensation. It's a very cache-oriented harness, and delivers on its promise of being very economical. I doubt I've spent more than $10 with DeepSeek over the months I've used it. When I want a harness to inhale a codebase and give me an answer, Reasonix has been the go-to for a while now, and it's great. DeepSeek-V4-Flash is enough for many simple things, though I just run it on DeepSeek-V4-Pro because it's so cheap that I don't care.