Best AI coding plan alternative to Claude and ChatGPT

16 points by Jsttan 53 days ago | 13 comments

With the lowering usage limit in Claude, I am thinking of jumping ship to Chinese AI, since the benchmark is already very near compared to Sonnet or Haiku 4.5 , but for a fraction of the price. I am not worried about where is my data ending up through, I am focused on performance and usage limit. I mostly use it for coding and research.

However, I am currently deciding on which to use, and would love any recommendations from anyone that are using any or many of these AI,

- GLM Coding Plan (Z AI): $18/month Lite Plan - BytePlus: $10 ModelArk Coding Plan - Kimi AI: $19/month Moderato Coding Plan - MiniMax: $20 Plus Standard Plan

I would like to ask, is the performance good? Is it worth the value? And how is the usage limit? Also, if anyone have any good recommendation on AI plan that is only in Chinese language, I don’t mind too, as I can understand Chinese.

JSR_FDED 53 days ago |

I get Kimi through OpenCode Zen (kind of like openrouter for the OpenCode harness), periodically top up $20 and laugh every time I see my balance go down by 3 cents for something I would have happily paid someone $30.

aspectrr 52 days ago |

I like the GLM coding plan before they raised their prices, now their rate limits are more strict as they are compute constrained. It is still a good deal for 1/3 the price of Claude for the same quality.

irthomasthomas 53 days ago |

I like chutes. I think I get about 5K prompts per day for $20/m, though they may have stricter limits for new customers.

This gives you practically unlimited usage of frontier models like kimi, deepseek, glm. Their models are always fullsize, never quantised except where the lab themselves provides an 4bit or 8bit model. You can see from the model config exactly which hf model it pulls and the serving co figuration used.

Prompts are encrypted using Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). So neither a model host or neighbour can view your prompts. That's as close as you can get to local level privacy in the cloud.

comment0r 53 days ago | |

I tried looking into Chutes just now. Seems like there is no easy way to just pay & start using it with OpenCode or Claude Code, right? Their docs don’t seem to mention it. Do I really have to execute code with their API in order to use the models?

irthomasthomas 50 days ago | | |

No its super easy. I think the confusion is due to the serving and hosting APIs that let you add your own GPUs to a pool and earn money. But for regular inference they have an openai responses API a basic chat app. You can signup to a $3 subscription, or deposit $5 and use your api key.

https://chutes.ai/app/chute/2ff25e81-4586-5ec8-b892-3a6f3426...

curl -X POST \ https://llm.chutes.ai/v1/chat/completions \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHUTES_API_TOKEN" \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d ' { "model": "moonshotai/Kimi-K2.5-TEE", "messages": [ { "role": "user", "content": "Tell me a 250 word story." } ], "stream": true, "max_tokens": 1024, "temperature": 0.7 }'

brokegrammer 51 days ago |

I've been using the GLM coding plan. During off-peak hours, usage for GLM-5.1 uses only 1x of your quota, which means you get Sonnet-like quality for a fraction of the cost.

serf 53 days ago |

nous portal or openrouter with a harness that uses intelligent multi provider requests,a local memory system, and pre-sub context compaction on input. if you do similar stuff often your token usage will drop after awhile of using a memory subsystem like hindsight or honcho quite a bit, and even more if you're using your harness to build relevant skills for the repeated tasks.

mistercheese 53 days ago | |

Do you have a harness recommendation? Sounds like maybe you’re into Hermes?

fatbrowndog 53 days ago |

not good. I use DeepSeek's plan, Kimi AI, OpenRouter and it seemly consumes more tokens, than Claude's.

I consume Claude ~30% per day in of, 1 week, Max,x20. Equivalent in Kimi Ai, is I consume 60% in one day, in one week.

DeepSeek/Latest, 95% discount, with cache, I rack up ~$60/day before I stopped.

I don't know how Claude compute their daily limits, it seems much cheaper.

Jsttan 53 days ago | |

Which DeepSeek plan did you use? I been trying to find a DeepSeek for a while but with no success. I tried to use Claude $20 plan before, token burn like it is air, would be quite hard to believe anything else would burn so fast?

fatbrowndog 53 days ago | | |

I'm using the deepseek-v4-pro model is currently offered at a 75% discount. My bad it's 75% discount, via OpenRouter.

I use the Claude-Max-20 ($200) plan. I manage to max it out 2 weeks. Planning to move to maybe multiple accounts.

I use C++ and Claude for big code-base.

mmmehulll 51 days ago |

why not cursor? cursor seems pretty decent at what it does and i have had very few issues since i started using it about a couple of months back. But yes, frontend burns through tokens, else no issues with backend and devops

sidcool 53 days ago |

Antigravity?