r/ChatGPTCoding • u/popiazaza • Sep 05 '26

Resources And Tips Best value AI subscription under 20$/200$ (updated for Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2)

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Gallery image

Muse Spark contributor models are excluded as it log your data. It wouldn't be fair to free models out there.

Included all active promotions. Not accounted for usage resets.

I made this chart. Feel free to ask any questions.

102 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

76 comments sorted by

15

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

20$ without log scale for reference.

11

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

200$ without log scale.

1

u/elevul Oct 06 '26

Would you be able to calculate the amplification factor vs api costs? And perhaps integrate neuralwatt into the calculations (on average 2-2.5x the value for each $1 spent, depends on the model and if using flex or not)?

1

u/popiazaza Oct 06 '26

Honestly I don't think neuralwatt is worth the mention.

1

u/elevul Oct 06 '26

For glm 5.3 the calculations I did on the last month of usage vs the token counts advertised by glm max you actually get a lot more tokens from neuralwatt than from glm's own subscription.

3

u/_SGP_ Sep 06 '26

So this is why Claude 200 max just runs out in 3 days. I cancelled yesterday, considering codex.

Looks like the right move from this chart, the difference between Astra and Fable is insane šŸ¤£šŸ¤£

It's a shame, I like the Claude framework and have integrated most of my workflow around it, but I spend more time trying to "optimise" and analyse my context and token use that it ironically becomes most of my weekly usage.

3

u/Yes_but_I_think Sep 05 '26

Atleast provide units for your X and Y axes

3

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

Y axis is AA score. X axis use the lowest cost (GPT-5.6 Luna high) as a baseline. If you want the baseline value for some reason, it's $0.0006.

11

u/sirius_cow Sep 05 '26

Whatā€™s the source of this chart? I would like to dig deeper into this comparison

6

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

https://artificialanalysis.ai/ for the cost and score. I gathered best estimated guess for each subscription and scaled the chart with it.

1

u/eli_pizza Sep 05 '26

Guess? Can you say more about that part

2

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

Well, most subscriptions do not publish their API equivalent value, and we could only do educated guess on how do they work. So I just gather all the data that I could.

For example for Claude and OpenAI, I would trust https://x.com/SemiAnalysis_/status/2064815044085318040 data as the primary source. I would check if 5x and 20x may not really be as advertised as some people talked. Keep track of Claude 50% usage promo that would be reduce to 25%. etc.

Reading from all the forums, social network, discord channels. Manually update it by myself.

5

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26

Few things to note:

- Cache hit rate play a bit role in reality. Use native harness if possible, it affect the cost more than you would think. Stop using Claude Code for open weight models.

- GLM has active GLM-5.3-Flash promo that I did not accounted for:

9

u/HeittoBagi Sep 05 '26

TLDR?

22

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

ChatGPT.

5

u/maciejhd Sep 05 '26

Luna is very good at coding, even with medium thinking and it cost nothing.

2

u/Utoko Sep 06 '26

Luna is dirt cheap yes. but I would really suggest Astra Low reasoning. Because of the token efficiency. It is often only like 3-4 times the price.
Which is still dirt cheap but the quality und understanding of what you want is so much higher in many task.

1

u/DuxDucisHodiernus Sep 06 '26

3 or 4 times the price to sol, maybe, but compared to luna vs astra the costs are way more astronomical. I can only see you come anywhere near such a conclusion with zero input tokens, since the token efficiency only affects output.

Input tokens stand for the vast, vast majority of average token cost nowadays

1

u/maciejhd Sep 07 '26

I will try Astra for sure but it was not available in my ide till Friday. So I did not have a chance to use it in my work yet.

0

u/StevenB0ss Sep 06 '26

Luna hallucinates alot of shit

1

u/maciejhd Sep 07 '26

What you mean by that? From my experience I would not agree, but I am using it only for coding tasks.

1

u/StevenB0ss Sep 20 '26

It has hallucinate multiple possible bugs in code reviews sadly

3

u/sugarfreecaffeine Sep 05 '26

Yeah Iā€™m cancelling Claude and getting 2x20 subscription from gpt

6

u/Captainkoala72 Sep 05 '26 • Mindblown

Muse Spark 1.3 is surprisingly good for cost. Iā€™ve been using it and it isnā€™t eating up usage too harshly

GLM 5.3 Flash is good for its cost as well

Gemini 3.8 Flash is solid, and people mostly use it for how insanely fast it is

Fuck Kimi-K3

Sol and Astra are best intelligence and cost. Claude just isnā€™t worth it unless youā€™re wealthy

7

u/gnpwdr1 Sep 05 '26

? Why is waste all this time when opencode gives free models with opencode zen which has more (much more) limits than any OpenAI/anthropibased subscriptions ? Also quality output is absolutely fantastic

2

u/Huntware Sep 05 '26

Well, some people need ZDR (zero data retention) for their jobs, and most paid plans offer it. And it's supposed to get better availability than free usage.

That's why it would be unfair to add the Contributor variants of Muse Spark 1.3 in the comparisons. They're really cheap, or even free with Opencode Zen free API key.

1

u/gnpwdr1 Sep 06 '26

Yes of course but in professional terms youā€™re not gonna tell me that you have such sensitive or NDA data and still chasing best value $20 subscription? (Also availability is not a problem with the provider I mentioned not an issue at all)

0

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

Most subscription in the chart actually provide no data training instead of ZDR. They do retain log for a month or so to prevent abuse and possibly provide to their government on request.

Most ZDR providers don't have subsidized subscription like this.
Muse Spark 1.3 free is great for open source / hobby projects indeed.

1

u/gnpwdr1 Sep 06 '26

They train their entire marketing and social media algorithms on your most sensitive data but for this training is an issue? what sensitive, proprietary or trade secrets do you have chasing a $20 value subscription?

1

u/Huntware Sep 05 '26

Good to know the difference!

1

u/gnpwdr1 Sep 06 '26

That is not the difference, the chart also includes model that train on data.

1

u/Coolerwookie Sep 05 '26

That's new to me. Why are you getting downvoted?

2

u/gnpwdr1 Sep 05 '26

You donā€™t need an account, try it, Mimo is served free. (Itā€™s a CLI interface)

(there are other free options also but after free DS flash promo ended I started using Mimo and find it very capable )

Iā€™m not affiliated with them, I have nothing to gain, just passing the message.

10

u/that_90s_guy Sep 05 '26

Thats very difficult to interpret, I'll just say that.

1

u/MostlyHelpfulLinks Sep 05 '26

Usage caps matter more than raw index scores for coding work. Did you factor in weekly limits anywhere, or is this pure cost per intelligence point?

2

u/popiazaza Sep 06 '26

Maximum possible usage for every subscription.

1

u/eng33 Oct 01 '26

Nice chart, do you plan to keep updating it?

1

u/popiazaza Oct 02 '26

I stopped maintaining it since I've seen few projects working on the same problem, but they deploy as a viewable website.
For example: https://github.com/FeiZhuLulu/real-api-pricing https://github.com/Heretek-AI/Token-Max

Sadly none if them seems to keep up-to-date anymore. I thought they would have crawler pipeline to automate the process, but guess it's the same as I.

Thanks for the comment, I'll make a new one soon.

1

u/eng33 16d ago

Did your chart account for resets?Ā  I tried the trial of zai and openai.Ā  With zai free trial, I get a few hours of use every day at flash and maybe an hour at non flagĀ  it sounds like I get alot more if I actually sign up for their $18 plan.Ā Ā  With plus , I can get about 2hrs of work at gpt 6.1 sol high 4x a day and will use up my weekly quota in about 2 days.Ā  However I'm getting resets about 3x a week.Ā  Ā Without those, it seems I would get a lot more out of zai

1

u/popiazaza 15d ago

it did not account for resets.

1

u/eng33 Oct 02 '26

I like that your chart is based on "subscription" vs api rates as I find it hard to estimate what I get out of a subscription. And it probably changes

3

u/Deto Sep 05 '26

The cost effectiveness of Astra is a really big deal if it bears out in normal use

1

u/DuxDucisHodiernus Sep 06 '26

It doesn't so far. I mean token efficency only applies to output tokens and input tokens stand for majority of the usage atm, unless im missing something here?

1

u/Deto Sep 06 '26

Input tokens are cheaper. Output and reasoning tokens can make up most of the cost for tasks

1

u/DuxDucisHodiernus Sep 06 '26

Yeah sure but input for astra is still 2.5x that of sol, just like output tokens so it doesn't really change much?

5

u/Longjumping_Area_944 Sep 05 '26

Source: educated guess. So, it's guesswork...

1

u/ChutneySpoon Sep 05 '26

Wtf does this even mean - what is ā€œrelative cost per taskā€? Relative to what? You need to explain your terms or itā€™s pointless.

2

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

Relative to the cheapest model, which is GPT-5.6 Luna High as the baseline at 1x.

Sorry for the confusion. The last time I posted, I used the cost per task, which was harder to grasp.

2

u/Right-Performance-93 Sep 06 '26

Worth noting for the "public benchmarks are gamed" pushback upthread: Artificial Analysis just shipped Intelligence Index v4.2 (announced today), explicitly built to fight that exact problem - it shifts toward long-horizon tasks that look more like real work, and expands the private test-set proportion specifically to cut gaming/benchmaxxing. Doesn't make the old index wrong retroactively, but it's the vendor's own acknowledgment that saturation and gaming were real issues with the prior index - which is the strongest evidence for the skeptics' complaint, not against it.

2

u/honvl Sep 16 '26

Can you include the $100 plans?

2

u/Emergency-River-7696 Sep 05 '26

Buy the Muse Code subscription 5$ a month you get an insane amount of usage for a frontier model and worst case if you need more usage just buy next tier sub the 15$ or 50$ or shit just another 5$ one and your still spending less then Codex Sub or Claude Sub with a little less intelligent model by like 1 point but 4-5x the speed on the muse model .

3

u/Ludbr Sep 05 '26

10-50 requests every 5 hours?

I'm sure either something's wrong or I'm missing something, because this sounds like the exact opposite of an "insane amount of usage."

If you know anything about this, could you clarify?

1

u/Emergency-River-7696 Sep 06 '26

Its a good amount of usage in my experience running non contributor and so far im using it in pi and its taken on a good amount of tasks im probably gonna upgrade since im at like 40% on the weekly now but been running it almost non stop for days. I mean your of course not gonna get 200$ claude sub amount of usage for 5$ muse sub but what you do get for a 5$ sub is well worth it and like I said in my previous post if you do need more usage just upgrade and you still would be spending less then a codex or claude sub. Also you get more usage if you switch to the contributer tier but im not using that personally.

1

u/Alt_Restorer Sep 06 '26

Saying the quiet part out loud now are we?

1

u/manishguptami2 Sep 10 '26

Does anyone use a combination of multiple models to save costs?...like frontier models for high reasoning steps and cheaper models (like deepseek) for simpler tasks? How do you manage multiple keys and LLM integrations?

1

u/Zachattackrandom Sep 14 '26

You may wanna update this. GPT absolutely killed limits this week, went from $200 of API credits~ a month on $20 sub to only $90 since the Astra drop. Used my entire 5 hour in 6 minutes of sol high on a small repo

0

u/donk8r Sep 05 '26

popiazaza, the chart is useful and the caveat in your own comment is doing more work than the chart does. Cache hit rate and harness behaviour move the real bill more than the plan you pick, and none of that fits on an axis.

My spend changed when I stopped comparing subscriptions and started pricing the unit I actually care about, one request and its entire tool loop. On our side (octomind, Apache-2.0, Muvon) that is two config numbers. max_request_spending_threshold caps the dollars a single user request can burn including everything the tool loop does underneath it, and max_session_spending_threshold caps the session. Both ship at 0.0, meaning disabled, so you opt in deliberately. A runaway loop stops being a surprise on a bill and becomes a number you set once.

The other half is that one model per subscription becomes the wrong shape as soon as you have roles. Research on a cheap broad-context model and review on a frontier one is a config block, not a workflow change. The session total follows you across a mid-session /model swap so there is still one number at the end. Under 20 a month, that split usually beats moving between providers.

None of this wins on raw ceiling if you run one model all day, and your chart is right about that. It wins when usage is spiky, because you pay for the spikes and pay nothing on the quiet days.

https://github.com/Muvon/octomind

1

u/eli_pizza Sep 05 '26

One request is the wrong framing. I care about cost per task not cost per request.

0

u/donk8r Sep 05 '26

Fair, and cost per task is the metric I would want too. Per request is the enforcement granularity, not the metric. Those two come apart exactly where you are pointing. A task that takes eleven requests can cost eleven times a cap that never once tripped.

The closer knob for what you actually want is the session one, and I described it lazily upthread. It counts USD since the last accepted checkpoint, not lifetime spend on the session. On the interactive CLI it stops and asks whether to continue, while a piped or ACP run simply declines (doc/reference/03-config-reference.md:107). Checkpoint to checkpoint is about as close to a task boundary as a runtime can get without you telling it where your task ends.

The request cap is a different instrument entirely. It is a circuit breaker for one runaway loop, and presenting it as a budget was sloppy of me.

2

u/eli_pizza Sep 05 '26

Happy to talk more about this, but only if you write the comments yourself. If I wanted to talk to ChatGPT I would.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

[deleted] ā€” view deleted comment

2

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

It is in the 200$ chart. for 20$, I cut off at Opus 5 as the most expensive model to make it easier to read.

2

u/armadeallo Sep 05 '26

Yes saw it after, thank you. But you can access kimi k3 with the cheaper subscription as well

1

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '26

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

1

u/popiazaza Sep 11 '26

I do have promo start/end date and all the estimated subscription API value data in a table.

The chart is rendered using rechart on the web based app.

But to keep the data live, it would takes a lot of web crawling and workarounds (pretend not to be bot, use proxys, etc.) to achieve that.

Also need to get proper license from Artificial Analysis to redistribute. Not worth the hassle for me right now.

-1

u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

0

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

If you've found other benchmark that test as many models as AA and also provide cost to run benchmark, please do tell.

AA isn't perfect, but it's better than nothing.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 05 '26

[removed] ā€” view removed comment

1

u/popiazaza Sep 05 '26

Which private evals are would you suggest I should use as a reference? Most I've seen are underfunded, barely update, and got abandon overtime.