Comment by lowercased
3 days ago
I do. For local dev work, I'm mostly using jetbrains' Junie, I can swap between a collection of models from google, openai, anthrophic.
I've had more than a few people tell me "oh, it's so much cheaper to use a $20 claude account" or "i've never hit a limit ever using my openai". Inevitably.. I end up reading/hearing "oh, I need to give it another couple hours to start using it again"... I've never hit that with my approach, even if it's costing me a bit more. Being able to work when I want when I have time has some value.
I also have openai and anthropic direct API billing set up for hosted and client projects that need to call out to an LLM service.
Why not use a codex or claude subscription? If you use the entire usage allotment on the $200 plan it's about $2,000 in equivalent API costs. Switching providers may be valuable but it's quite literally an order of magnitude cheaper.
That's... $200. That's a lot for me. And I'm tied in to one set of models. Using something else (like Junie) I can swap and try models from multiple vendors.
I would investigate if the $20/month plan is good enough for your use: The token-based plans usually work out to be much more expensive than the monthly ones. Or get both the Anthropic and Codex $20/month plans. I don't know if this makes sense compared to your current use case, but there is a very good chance it does given how much the per-token plans cost. The primary use case for them is enterprises that aren't allowed to use the monthly subscriptions.
I only used that number because that's what I use. If you get the $20 codex plan that's equivalent to $100 in API costs, still a much better deal.
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>it's costing me a bit more
Would you mind sharing how much it's costing you? I've been wanting to use APIs from within Intellij, but I hesitate because of uncertainty about the cost.
Junie is $30/month, and I get $35 in credits. There are times I go over the limit, and you can 'top up' in increments of $5 (min). On a busy month (for me) I may have spent and extra $40. Initially I didn't hit the limit. As it's more of a daily driver, I'm averaging an extra $20, so... maybe $50/month. Give it a shot - the CLI version made it more usable.
I thought Air was JB's multi-model interface? What is Junie? (I see the buttons, but am very confused by JB's AI offerings in general)
Is it worth the ~10x extra cost over the subscriptions? (This is obviously a leading question). Also, I think you can use OpenAI's subcription login with Air, but not Claude's.
It IS confusing. I'm not even using Air.
Junie is their agent(?) that can connect to multiple providers. AFAIK you can bring-your-own-key or buy a subscription from them that lets you use your credits across multiple vendors (openai, anthropic, google) across a handful of models from each vendor. So yeah, you can use your openai credentials in junie vs paying for jetbrains junie credits.
Is it 'worth it'? I dunno. I've not used dedicated subscriptions. I adopted Junie when it first came out, and it's been 'good enough'. As I say, I've never hit the 'oh, i have to stop for several hours until they let me in again' wall because of just using the API approach.
As my monthly spend goes up, I might try something else out, but... gpt6-luna just came out. That is likely going to cut my spend already.
I do. Sharing training data with OpenAI gives me a lot of complementary tokens. I go above that but it's still quite economical and I pick the right model for the task (Luna for most).
20$ subscriptions offer “top up” too I’m pretty sure.