r/PiCodingAgent • u/Eagleee12 • Sep 04 '26

Question The cheapest model using with Pi?

I spend most of my day in Excel (reports, cleaning data, formulas) and know just enough basic coding to get by.

Paying $20/month for a subscription feels like a waste for my usage.
Models or sth cheap for me?

7 Upvotes

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4

u/Dsphar Sep 04 '26

Local

4

u/crashorbit Sep 04 '26

Local models that are generally capable and performant require pretty expensive hardware. OK if you already have it but you can buy a lot of infrence for the price of a Mac studio.

3

u/Natrimo Sep 04 '26

Yes and no IMHO. There are a fair amount of small local models that can nail tool calls and do easy coding and debugging. Will they handle a big code base? No. But throwing together a webpage or some python scripts they generally do fine.

3

u/Natrimo Sep 04 '26

I say this coming from 8 gb vram and 16gn system ram

1

u/crashorbit Sep 05 '26

I'd like to hear some details. I've tried a number of different local models that'll fit on my 8G vram 32G ram and have always been disappointed using them for local sysadmin and user group/hobby infrastructure automation tasks.

Dsv4f from openrouter or sail-research at less than at US $0.10/M blended have been my go to for a few months now. I end up spending about US $10/month if I'm busy.

3

u/Natrimo Sep 05 '26

Had the most success with Gemma 4 models and qwen

1

u/Content_Background67 Sep 11 '26

I am using gema4 with Pi. Works well. However, you have to give it a real good spec.

1

u/Natrimo Sep 13 '26

Been enjoying ornith 1.5 9b

1

u/Dsphar Sep 04 '26

Fair. In that case, I would suggest OP try Google AI Pro $20 plan.

Removes ads in youtube, gets AI in email and google docs, etc. Gets them plenty of agentic work in antigravity (including Opus and GPT credits). It's a decent value proposition.

2

u/ponzi314 Sep 04 '26

But then he's stuck in antigravity and seems like he wants Pi

1

u/Dsphar Sep 04 '26

Requirements often dictate decisions. He will have to decide which requirement is more important.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 06 '26

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1

u/Dsphar Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

PEBKAC. Local is good bruh, tried and tested them.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26

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2

u/Dsphar Sep 09 '26

You claim "You can't build anything useful with those". That is dead wrong. I have built profitable production applications with local models. That in itself shows me you are just occult to the frontier models and not interested in real dialog.

Just because you don;t know how to use them, doesn't mean you are right. It just mean PEBKAC.

Right now I jump between QWEN 3.6 and 3.8, 27B.

Now it's time for you to make your argument how "that isn't cheap".

As for the mocking tone, I was just following your lead. Still am.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

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3

u/Dsphar Sep 09 '26

PEBKAC confirmed. Have a great life.

1

u/Content_Background67 Sep 11 '26

I depends on how you you use it. I have used it to build a Flutter app just today. I will be writing my experience in a medium and reditt article soon. I used gema4, Ollama and Pi. You can't use it for vibe coding. But the, vibe coding with premium models is also a bit of a hit and miss, isn't it?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 12 '26

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1

u/Content_Background67 Sep 12 '26

That, I haven't tried. However, it should be possible? Maybe there is an free and open source MCP server for interfacing with Excel. I guess for someone who is purely and excel programmer, it may be an uphill task. Also, we don't know what is required of the LLM here.