Comment by danenania

Another suggestion to get the most bang for your buck: use the best model you have access to with max reasoning for planning, implement with a smaller model/lower reasoning, then review with the big model. Repeat as needed.

Input tokens are much cheaper than output tokens. Not only because of baseline price—caching makes a huge difference too. There are many ways to take advantage of this asymmetry to get similar quality for a fraction of the cost!