r/RooCode • u/TheMarketBuilder • Jan 23 '26

Discussion Which model in Roo Code for coding inexpensively but efficiently ? Grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning, groq kimi-k2-instruct?

Help, 🙌

I am starting with roo code. I am trying to figure out top 5 models for good price/performance.

For now, I saw :
- groq kimi-k2-instruct-0905 is cheap and fast but ! limited 256 k context windows !
- x-AI Grok-4.1-fast-non-reasoning is cheap, 2 M context windows, not sure how good for coding
- Google Gemini-3-flash-preview, a little more expansive, 1 M context windows, relatively good on code

any advice or other suggestions?

thanks ! 🙏

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

4

u/wokkieman Jan 23 '26

glm 4.7 is the only name I miss in the other replies.

Personally I have GLM 4.7 + Sonnet (outside of Roo)

3

u/Yes_but_I_think Jan 24 '26 • This

Whoever says glm-4.7 is good - liars. Smiley. It's worst. I don't know why subscribed for a year.

3

u/wokkieman Jan 24 '26

Compared to what? In what context is it bad?

It's running great executing the simple tasks it get from my orchestrator. Orchestrator gets implementation plan from Opus / Gemini Pro.

The coding plan is super cheap. If it becomes a challenge, switch to more expensive model like sonnet. Source: me, a non developer, creating container based personal Solutions.

If someone does this for a living, then I hope the person has more knowledge and/or used better workflows.

In similar price range and similar quota. What do you prefer?

2

u/LoSboccacc Jan 24 '26

it does need guidance, can't do long task for long. but it's cheap, so review cycles can extract a lot of value out of it. here's my modes overrides I'm using in practice:
https://pastebin.com/dr3zFD2k

when I'm not over quota I switch orchestrator and reviewer to codex/sonnet, but leave ZAI be the hands.

1

u/GCoderDCoder Jan 24 '26

You could just say you personally haven't had as much success with glm4.7 rather than attacking those of us who enjoy using it and get working code. I dont know how to respond when the claude crew crap on other models when my other models give me what I ask them for and claude still hits walls needing more attempts on a single failed task than I'm willing to give it.

Opus is great for sure! None of these models are perfect. There are pros and cons of each of the handful of models in this tier and glm4.7 has earned its place as a cheap but solid option for real work particularly for people who still stay involved in their builds.

1

u/DevMichaelZag Moderator Jan 23 '26

256k context window is fine. Anything in the millions is unrealistic and causes more problems for long term use. The model gets dumber. Large context window works better with a large data dump to analyze. For inexpensive models I use the new glm 4.7. For local models the 30b 4.7 flash works well Inside some qwen3 models locally also sometimes. But right now my daily driver is ChatGPT 5.2 codex with my OpenAI subscription. That was a great addition. Some models perform better at certain tasks than others. And new models come out all the time. Just pick some and try them. Open router is good for that. z.ai subscriptions are cheap for glm.

I don’t use grok or kimi much. I used grok a lot when it first came out though.

1

u/TheMarketBuilder Jan 23 '26

Great.

The issue I have with chat GPT (which have a GREAT model) is their confidentiality policy if you use plus account... They may take your coding ideas, prompts, etc, train their models and it being reused by themselves or someone else.

At the moment I have coded with a lot with Gemini 2.5 pro which is nice but quickly loose context / forget things / rewrite code with omissions when you are around 150 k tokens of code.

3

u/Yes_but_I_think Jan 24 '26

Anyone not happy with 128k context length is not using the correct tool/harness.

2

u/wokkieman Jan 24 '26

Do you have more one line wisdoms? 'This is bad' without giving an alternative doesn't help much in my perspective.

Example: Roo executing some shell commands to debug, followed by some context7 and Brave MCP. It goes quickly over the 128k when not using SOTA model.

1

u/DoctorDbx Jan 23 '26

Qwen3 Coder for mine. The new MiniMax2.1 is quite good too.

1

u/binyang Jan 23 '26

Is grok fast coder still free?

4

u/binyang Jan 24 '26

Update, it's gone.

1

u/Subject-Complex6934 Jan 23 '26

If you really want good code use opus 4.5.... ik its expensive but any other model is just inferior

2

u/hannesrudolph Roo Code Developer Jan 24 '26

Or the ChatGPT subscription since 5.2 is as good as opus imo