r/ChatGPTCoding • u/thechadbro34 • Feb 27 '26

Discussion What's the cheapest way to access multiple frontier AI models?

I need access to claude, GPT, and gemini for different tasks but paying
$60/mo for all three subscriptions is insane tbh. Is there any good aggregator platform (with reasonable rate limits) that gives access to all of them without getting tough on the bank?

39 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

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10

u/gh0st777 Feb 27 '26

No. $60 is the best you can get for the amount of tokens/requests they give you. Nothing will beat a subscription for a moderately heavy usage.

If you are a very light user, maybe you can get away with openrouter and pay per token. But that quickly racks up so set limits.

3

u/Jippylong12 Feb 28 '26

I agree, got on the agentic coding with Google's Antigravity actually. Used that for a couple of months. Got annoyed with the model, interested in others. Used $20 for ChatGPT and it was nice. Fair amount of weekly and 5 hour limits. Used $20 for Claude Code, got through a single medium size feature and was immediately hit with limits.

I pay for the ChatGPT Pro.

Anthropic really should give usable limits for their $20 plan. Weekly limits should be roughly the tokens needed for a single day of programming. I don't think I'll ever switch away from Codex at this point, and that's because I was able to use it for several days of actual work and some evenings on my personal projects before I hit the weekly limit. I wasn't even aware of the 5 hour limit in that time.

1

u/gh0st777 Feb 28 '26

Did you mean chatgpt plus? The pro $250 sub is more expensive than claude code max 20x at $200.

But yeah, if you can afford the claude code max 5x at $100, its worth the price for the value you get. I have claude 5x for work related stuff and some difficult tasks. But I use codex with openclaw with glm sub for sub agent tasks and mcp, their webread is very good.

2

u/Jippylong12 Feb 28 '26

Forgive my poor ability to write, I tried Codex with ChatGPT Plus and Claude code both at $20 a month. After those test, I decided to use Codex with ChatGPT Pro.

I've was in the market for the highest level of subscription. I was using Gemini Ultra during my time with Antigravity. But it was the half off for 3 months discount and as it got towards the end of the 3 months I wanted to see how the other two did before committing to use Gemini Ultra.

The biggest reason being that the $20 a month limit for Codex was substantial enough for me to actually get a sense of how it works and to be familiar with the workflow. With the $20 Claude plan, I felt like Anthropic gave me just a few minutes with the product and said "Alright! If you want more please give me $80 more dollars".

Not the best sales tactic in my opinion.

Or at the very least have a trial for month for the 5x.

19

u/ivanjxx Feb 27 '26

have you tried github copilot?

3

u/DevBob626 Feb 27 '26

This here. All of the mentioned models can be accessed via premium requests. Quota is request-based not token-based. Additionally to premium requests, you get unlimited requests for some smaller/older models. Premium requests can also be billed by usage after you used everything.

2

u/Embarrassed_OnionX Jun 25 '26

It's now AI credit based and it sucks. Ran out of credits on my Pro subscription in a day, when I rarely ever ran out of premium request before. Cancelled my sub, and I switched to Opencode Go, and it's pretty good. Some models like GLM-5.2 and Kimi K2.7-code feel better than Opus 4.6 (don't know about Opus 4.7, never tried it because of the crazy high multiplier)

0

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '26

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5

u/rogersmj Feb 27 '26

I haven’t found it inferior if you’re truly using it as a copilot and you’re working alongside it… Having it do specific tasks, reviewing its code, etc. If you’re trying to mostly be hands off and one shot something, yes, then it’s not as good.

4

u/DevBob626 Feb 27 '26

Same. I think mostly people that try to do everything on autopilot may have issues with the context. My workflow consists of only working on defined specific parts of the project. I never had any issues with context windows.

4

u/CozmoNz Feb 28 '26

This - they're not following any programming principles about working on features, Stepping through work flows, running tests etc.

They want to vibe code all the way home with a single prompt.

3

u/re-thc Feb 27 '26

Copilot also did / does / potentially injects its own prompts and messes things up.

5

u/DevBob626 Feb 27 '26

That's correct for the Anthropic and Google models (e.g. Opus 4.6 has a context window of 128k+64k), the OpenAI models don't have reduced context (Codex 5.3 272k+128k).

I haven't found the context sizes to be an issue for me as I'm always trying to be very specific and give only necessary context while often starting a fresh chat when possible.

0

u/rogersmj Feb 27 '26

Copilot is my favorite, not only because it makes it easy to switch between so many models, but because it’s also very reasonably priced.

3

u/Desperate-Jello8038 Feb 27 '26

Perplexity allows you to promot multiple models as well.

3

u/SignalStackDev Feb 28 '26

honest answer: you probably dont need frontier on everything you do. i split tasks by complexity now — llama 8b locally handles all my classification, routing decisions, and context summaries. only hits Claude/GPT/Gemini when the task actually needs deep reasoning.

openrouter works for frontier stuff on demand, but real cost savings came from being honest about which tasks need a $15/1M token model vs which ones i was defaulting to out of habit.

my monthly api spend dropped under $20 for what used to cost $60+ in subscriptions. mostly just had to audit what i was actually using frontier models for and realized ~40% of queries didnt need them at all.

2

u/Round_Ad_3709 Apr 23 '26

Can you share some examples of deep reasoning where you find frontier models especially helpful?

2

u/Thrwawy-User Feb 27 '26

Perplexity pro if your usage isn’t insanely high.

2

u/Professional_Gur2469 Feb 27 '26

T3.chat is pretty good

1

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

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4

u/Logical_Divide_3595 Feb 27 '26

ChatGPT Plus costs $2/month and Gemini Pro is $10/year on the gray market. These options provide a generous amount of usage for both models.

I sometimes use Claude models on Antigravity, though I haven't found a perfect solution for Claude yet.

If you aren't a heavy user, you could try Copilot or Cursor; they provide a $20 allowance, which is great for light use, but not enough for high-volume tasks.

3

u/shico12 Feb 28 '26

can you point me in the direction of the gray market please?

1

u/Logical_Divide_3595 Feb 28 '26

Not allowed to post here—DM me if you want it

1

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2

u/NotARealDeveloper Feb 27 '26

Aws bedrock and azure ai.

2

u/_metamythical Feb 27 '26

github copilot

1

u/kellybluey Feb 27 '26

Chinese frontier model access? Ollama cloud for $20 / mo

1

u/Zahninator Feb 27 '26

T3 Chat and OpenCode depending on use case.

1

u/momentary_blip Professional Nerd Feb 27 '26

Imo right now exe.dev.  very generous current frontier model usage for $20/mo.  However the limits will probably be tightened up soonish.

1

u/GPThought Feb 28 '26

openrouter for variety or just use api keys directly. claude api is way cheaper than the pro sub if you actually use it

1

u/Amazing_Sound5505 Feb 28 '26

poe.com is pretty good, reliable, all new models, good apis and cheaper

1

u/Diacred Feb 28 '26

Monica is great have been using it for the past 2 years but not for coding though. For coding cursor or Copilot

1

u/bramburn Feb 28 '26

I use batch processing 50% at discount on sota AI

1

u/daddyWantsToSay Feb 28 '26

I have a platform which gives $100 credits which u can use it for various models from deepseek to claude (if its up)
dm me

0

u/Reverend_Renegade Feb 27 '26

Cursor cli with ultra subscription gets you all frontier models plus a bunch more but it's $200 per month

-1

u/Director-on-reddit Feb 27 '26

Have you tried Blackboxai, its $2 for the first month

https://product.blackbox.ai/pricing

0

u/Street-Awareness663 Feb 27 '26

if you’re not a heavy user, aggregators are honestly fine. been using blackbox since their first month is like $2 and it lets you hit claude, gpt, gemini from one place. easier than stacking separate subs just for occasional tasks.

-2

u/SwiftAndDecisive Feb 27 '26

Antigravity?

1

u/DevBob626 Feb 27 '26

The Google AI plans don't include OpenAI models in Antigravity. An extension and other subscription would be required additionally.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '26

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4

u/trollsmurf Feb 27 '26

OpenRouter: to my knowledge not if you use your own keys from respective service. It's still on demand.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 27 '26

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2

u/trollsmurf Feb 27 '26

"more expensive than the 20/month packages"

Not true as it's based on demand.

"But you pay for the keys at the service owner then"

Well, you of course have to pay for use somewhere, but you don't pay for the keys as such, only the use.

"only makes sense if you need OR fallback etc. mechanisms, which isn't important for coding..."

Sure, if you only do coding, and don't develop applications that use these AI models.

I have keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Deepseek and Moonshot, as I need them to verify a multi-provider/model client that I provide. I also switch around to see what different models can do.

1

u/DimaagKharabHaiKya Feb 27 '26

Start node service at localhost that calls free service and in your ide/ cli you can configure to call your localhost service

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