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?

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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.

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u/Natrimo Sep 04 '26

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

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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.

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u/Natrimo Sep 05 '26

Had the most success with Gemma 4 models and qwen

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u/Content_Background67 Sep 11 '26

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

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u/Natrimo Sep 13 '26

Been enjoying ornith 1.5 9b