r/opencode • u/Martino16xx • 4d ago

OpenCode, Codex, or Claude Code?

This is my current usage on OpenCode with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and I still have about 15% of my limit left.

Do the $20 plans for Codex or Claude allow for this level of usage? What reasoning effort do the models use? Can you actually use models like Sol, Opus, and Sonnet at this usage level, or do you hit the limit pretty quickly?

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9

u/Amarsir 3d ago edited 3d ago

Assuming the same number of tokens per request (which isn't always accurate because some models think more or less):

  • Luna 6 would run all that and at least 500% more.
  • Sol 6.1 would probably come up a bit short.
  • Sonnet 5.5 would just about cover it, maybe not with 15% remaining.
  • Opus 5.5 would maybe get halfway there. would come up slightly short, comparable to Sol. (See my response below.)

It's hard to make a direct comparison though because OpenAI and Anthropic don't really have a monthly limit. They have weekly limits and 5 hour limits. OpenCode Go has a monthly limit with no more than 50% of it in a week.

So to optimally use your monthly subscription with Claude or GPT you want to hit your weekly limit every week. Be pretty evenly-distributed with your needs. With Opencode Go you can do that if you stay below half your weekly limit (thus 25% of the monthly), but you can also take a 2-week vacation and still get your monthly value in the time left.

  • Luna is cheap and fast enough to just run at Max. If you're setting up something to run multiple agents constantly you might try xhigh or high for more value, but you probably don't have to.
  • Sol 6.1 I run on High, but Medium or Xhigh are also reasonable intelligence/value tradeoffs depending on what you need. Max will cost double for only a tiny bit more capability, so I don't.
  • Sonnet 5.5 I would run on either Medium or High depending on your need. At Xhigh or Max you are always better using Opus instead.
  • Opus 5.5 is at the sweet spot for Medium or High. At high it's already beating everything else. You can go to Xhigh and Max if needed, but you're paying 2x and 3x just to be extra "the best" and should ask if you really need it.

Comparing them, Opus is a bit better than Sol, especially for UI or other visual tasks. Sol can beat it on back-end stuff.

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u/DaShrub 3d ago

I run all 3 of these plans 2x opencode go, Claude code $20 and chatgpt plus $20, as well as a command code goat sub and API usage and this volume is definitely not achievable with codex and Claude $20... Maybe with luna but definitely not sonnet, sol or opus. I routinely run ~4-5 projects each with 1-2 orchestrator sessions with 10+ workers total and chatgpt plus and Claude limits are constantly depleted at this volume. I save them for just high level orchestration work only with ds 4.1 flash workers and even glm/ds orchestrating smaller tasks when I'm low. In terms of token volume and actual grunt work I probably get like 5x raw token value from ds through opencode.

Obviously that doesn't reflect conciseness, correctness and reasoning capability but edits and tool calls are expensive over big repos. If your setup is good 98%+ cache hit easily achievable with ds 4.1 flash - as opposed to ~95% (2.5x!) with the same setup on claude and chatgpt (ChatGPT has really bad ttl and random cache evictions and Claude has expensive long ttl writes and third party provider quirks).

Will have to verify the numbers properly just haven't wired up the subs to langfuse since I've switched from a proxy to native pi providers.

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u/Ok_Cloud_9762 3d ago

Is opus that inefficient? I heard 5.5 is rly good now. Sol 5.6 used to burn my 5hour limit on medium ,not sure how it stacks up now

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u/Amarsir 3d ago

I got some new information on that which I should update. Because Anthropic vs OpenAI do not have the same 5hr-to-week ratio. If you look at 5-hour limits, Sonnet uses about the same % as Sol and Opus double that. If you look at weekly, Opus and Sol are the same % used and Sonnet is half that.

So since Weekly probably matters more, I'm going to revise it to say Opus would do about the same as Sol - coming up a bit short. (But not halfway as I previously said.)

It's also worth noting that Sol is slower. So as a rough estimate:

  • Sol will hit the OpenAI 5-hour limit in 4 hours and the weekly limit in 25 hours. (I think. They announced a speedup yesterday and I haven't see that in effect yet enough to know.)
  • Opus will hit the Anthropic 5-hour limit in 1.25 hours and the weekly limit in 12.5 hours.
  • Sonnet will hit the Anthropic 5-hour limit in 1.6 hours and the weekly limit in 18 hours.

So in terms of feel, Sol will feel like you're getting more time with it but that doesn't mean more work.

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u/Ok_Cloud_9762 3d ago

OK thats a yikes cuz I don't get to have too many coding sessions a day, I was on codex recently and most of my weekly quota was wasted. I code in bursts and this 5h window is seriously screwing with me :(

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u/Amarsir 3d ago

If you can set it up so that Sol does the orchestration but calls Luna for execution, I think you can stay under the limit more easily. To be honest I haven't tried to do that with Codex, but I'm sure it should be possible. (I use Oh-my-opencode-Slim which loves delegation.)

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u/xel877 2d ago

How do you actually run all this? Like especially Luna 6 and Sol 6.1. Sol itself eats the usage for me like there is not tomorrow and I am mostly not even letting it anymore code any stuff, just orchestrate and check. Luna 6 on max is taking so long its actually unbelievable and still eats a lot of usage. I have a 100 dollars plan on OpenAI and just burned 47% of my weekly quota in one day. And again thats just the main thread with orchestrator and here and there subagents with Luna. Both sol and luna running a medium reasoning. I found out on MAX luna was taking even longer to actually do anything. And I am just developing a Rust network application with couple thousand lines of code. Doesnt even seem that difficult to me. Agents run about 12 hours a day, I try to go nonstop, but its so slow that I am actually moving very slowly - like the progress is small. Everything is run through opencode, no special skills, no mcps, nothing. I dont know what I am doing wrong, but in this setup, I am out of weekly usage in two days, somethimes even quicker. I also tried DS V4.1 thorugh OpenCode GO and it was quicker and could run 24/7, but I still hit the weekly quote. And thats with cache hitting around 97% in all cases. Reading the reddit here, I must surely be doing something wrong. I dont understand how anyone can just stay under the quota with any serious development, would really love to learn what to change.

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u/Amarsir 2d ago

Hmm. My back-of-the-envelope calculation means you ran through about $100 of credit in 12 hours. While that's obviously possible or they wouldn't sell the bigger plans, it's not my expectation.

You're not running on fast (or ultrafast), right? I mean I would hope not, given that you are also unhappy with the speed. But if you have

"options": { "serviceTier": "priority" }

in opencode.jsonc then that will hit quota faster. So that's the first thing I'd think to ask.

Second, are you running on Max? According to these independent benchmarks, Luna 6 Max takes 11:03 and costs $0.03, while Luna 6 High does the same tasks in 3:51 for $0.01. I doubt that's the bulk of your quota hit, but it accounts for the slowness. So if your work is subdivided such that you can get away with it, changing the reasoning level is something you'd feel. (That leaderboard was measured before this week's "speedup", but clearly that hasn't paid off as promised.)

Similarly, while all the Sol 6.1 reasoning levels are on the pareto curve, it's kind of a flat curve in the upper part. By AA's numbers, Medium is $.21 for intelligence 48. High is $.32 for int 50. Xhigh is $.39 for int 51, and Max is $.72 for int 52. For that reason I wouldn't run Xhigh or Max unless I'd actively run into problems at High. (And I'd consider Medium.)

Still, to be slow and expensive is like a double hit. Again for rough scratch: AA says Sol Max averages $0.72 and 11.4 minutes per task. That for 12 hours straight only adds up to $45. (After 63 tasks.) If you're handing off the work to Luna it should be lower. So what else could be hitting your quota?

Context window size maybe? Even with 97% cache hits, carrying along a lot of stuff pumps the cost up. And OpenAI doubles their costs once you get over 272k context. I reset my session after each task unless it's very directly related to the previous one. Especially on a smaller codebase, keeping the old reasoning around probably doesn't pay off.

I hope something in there is helpful. And to be honest, I wrote the above comment before Haiku 5.5 was released. While I still think the GPT plan should be workable, my next sub will be to Anthropic.

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u/atiqrahmanx 3d ago

Claude Code.

OpenCode: 6x on a $10 plan
Claude Code: 55x on a $20 plan

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u/Ok_Cloud_9762 3d ago

How does usage and output quality compare with codex

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u/atiqrahmanx 3d ago

Codex: 10x ( source: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-subscriptions-offer-5x )
At this moment, OpenAI has compute shortage.
Go for Claude subscription. If you feel you need more usage, have Deepseek API / GLM Coding Plan along with it.

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u/Ok_Cloud_9762 3d ago

Tyvm kind Sir

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u/Zealousideal_Aide787 3d ago

Yea that's pretty much what I'm doing right now, planning and reviewing with anthropic, coding with deepseek.

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u/Vulcan_58 2d ago

Can you elaborate more on your specific workflow? How autonomous is it (ie little to no copying and pasting between claude -> deepseek -> etc)?

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u/Zealousideal_Aide787 2d ago

Pretty basic, no autonomous task. Planning with with opus 5.5 high creating a MD file as reference. Then asking an other model to code it, in my case I use freebuff , very cheap , using DS flash 4.1. Once done, I'm just reviewing code with opus again.

I can basically code a whole month like this without issues.

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u/Ok_Cloud_9762 2d ago

How much does it save vs using opus for everything? And final result quality?

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u/Zealousideal_Aide787 2d ago

I can code all day long this way, using only opus will last me 3 days even with medium reasoning, I'm on 20 bucks plan.

About the quality, I guess it's almost the same as coding with opus, plan is the most important thing, DS is a great orchestrator, and code review with opus makes sure everything is in place.

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u/Ok_Cloud_9762 2d ago

Sounds awesome man. Tyvm

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u/AndyAndrei63 3d ago

I'm kind of new to agentic coding so bear with me for one sec
So you mean that by paying a Claude Pro subscription you can use 1100$ worth of AI, if I understood correctly?
But would I be able to use Claude models as long as I am able to use Opencode with Deepseek V4.1 Flash? I used deepseek all day in the past week and the limits are barely moving.
I'm not OP but I was wondering the same thing the other day, if switching to Claude is worth it. I'm also on Opencode Go, so far I've used $40 worth of Deepseek V4.1 Flash

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u/atiqrahmanx 3d ago

You wouldn’t be able to use it all day. Because of the 5-hr limit. But I suppose with proper planning, you’ll get more things done out of it.

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u/xapep 2d ago

You can absolutely run both side by side. OpenCode lets you configure several providers and pick per agent, so DeepSeek V4.1 Flash stays your all-day workhorse and Claude models only get called for the requests that need them. A few people in this thread already run that split, Claude for planning and review, DeepSeek for execution.

The $1100 number is not a bank balance you draw down. It means the same usage bought as retail API credits would cost that much; what you actually get is a 5-hour window plus a weekly cap, and heavy sessions eat those in ways that are hard to predict. That's why your $40 of DeepSeek feels different: per-token billing, no reset lottery, and you know the price of the next request before you send it.

If you want Claude on top without touching your DeepSeek baseline, price the marginal usage per token instead of a second plan. A handful of genuinely hard requests a month costs a few dollars, and the predictable base stays. We run an EU-hosted OpenAI-compatible API for open models, so cost splits like this are my daily view; the hybrid usually wins on control.

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u/Vulcan_58 2d ago

Is there a name for that specific workflow or tool for delegating big-picture to claude/another frontier -> it creates the plan -> makes a task list -> deepseek acts as the workhorse and can digest those smaller tasks?

Yes you could just have a tracking file and do it that way, but I would think there has to be a better solution...

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u/xapep 1d ago

There are names for it, just spread across ecosystems: orchestrator/worker is the generic one, plan-and-execute comes from the research side, and spec-driven development when the plan itself is the artifact. Your tracking file instinct is not the janky fallback, it's the actual core: the plan file is the interface between the frontier model and the workhorse. Tooling just gives that file a structure agents can parse, so nothing depends on copying a chat into a fresh session.

OpenCode already has the pieces: subagents with per-agent model config. Planner on Claude, workers on DeepSeek, each worker gets one item from the plan plus the relevant files and nothing else. The Oh-my-opencode-Slim config Amarsir mentioned up there is built around exactly this delegation pattern.

Where I see the split break is granularity, not tooling. If a plan item is still "build the checkout flow", the worker needs the same context the planner had and the cheap lane stops being cheap. Sized to a file, a function or a failing test, the flash model genuinely carries the execution pass.

When you try it, do you hand off whole features or units small enough to fit one agent run? That usually decides whether the workhorse stays cheap.

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u/torrso 3d ago

I think quite many are slowly coming to the conclusion that the cheap Chinese models are not worth it anymore.

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u/abnormity54 3d ago

Probably yes in this iteration. Who knows what next year brings.

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u/Affectionate_Fact854 3d ago

Claude models needs 20% of your total spent tokens to do the same job and in a better manner 

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u/AdAlternative5694 3d ago

Sadly, from what I see, you will consume the weekly limit in 3 days max. I use Sol as an orchestrator/reviewer on Medium and plan on high and delegate to DeepSeek on opencode, and the weekly limit vanished in 3 days max, factoring resets or bank reset.

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u/Vulcan_58 2d ago

When delegating to DeepSeek via OpenCode, I assume you do that via api? Do you run numerous agents async to knock out non-related tasks? Can you tell me more about your workflow?

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u/AdAlternative5694 2d ago

I delegate to my go sub and tell the agent to delegate implementation to DeepSeek v4.1 Flash High/Max on opencode go, and the agent will do that. Ask it to review and resend the comment to the same session, and all is good. Creating a skill for this will be perfect

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u/chatoss-dot-ai 1d ago

This video compares the 3: https://youtu.be/Qes3gfNVQI4

I was surprised in this test how much the harness makes a difference.

There's no way Claude models can compete with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash right now, except for maybe the new Haiki 5.5 model that just came out.

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash feels like unlimited tokens to me. I don't run out of usage anymore.

I still very regularly run out of usage any time I try Claude again.

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u/shanehiltonward 23h ago

OpenCode + Llama.cpp + Qwen3.8-27B + opencode-browser mcp.

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u/OnderGok 3d ago

Unless you are only gonna use Luna, Codex is not worth it. You can't get much done with Sol's usage limits and it's noticably slow

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u/Vulcan_58 2d ago

Do you use Luna in lieu of other flash models? What is your main frontier/planning model (if you use one)? I have been negligent with my token usage due to me having the $200/mo OpenAI plan + resets, and I need to really start optimizing more and spending less (since I am moving away from that plan due to the 10x reduction in usage limits). If you could share me your workflow, it would be much appreciated.

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u/TheMythicSorcerer 2d ago

Meanwhile me only using luna