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Last post I mentioned broker sites for flagship models, where you can get pricing down to about a tenth of list. Still too rich for subagents or anything you run all day. For normal use, unless you're doing development or research, I keep landing on the ~30 tier of Artificial Analysis: deepseek-v4.1-flash. Step up to ~40, which is Kimi K3.1 Pro, and the price goes 10x. For DS itself, these three subscriptions are the cheapest route today. OpenDesign Go says $120 of usage, OpenCode Go and Command Code GOAT say $100. Those aren't the same number though. OpenDesign's $120 is one pool shared by 12 models, with a $10 cap per 5 hours. The other two give DS its own allowance and $20 per 5 hours.
wokey is a marketplace for LLM quota. It pairs people with unused plan credits to people who need more, and takes a 20% cut. Sellers keep 80% of what their credits earn; buyers save up to 90% of the official API price. I use it mostly for flagship models. The models check out as the real thing, cost less than going direct, and I skip the subscription jugglingling. If all you call are cheap models, a router still beats it. 🔗 https://wokey.ai/r/GKT1C78R
Won't refund the subscription either. I'm half convinced the appeal email is itself phishing, because I'm pretty sure they log the IP. DHH came to Shenzhen recently and showed how he uses Claude Code over there. That's the safest way now, honestly: run Claude Code on an overseas machine, connect through Tailscale, never use it locally. So I need to rent an overseas box with a residential IP, and register and log into Claude there.
Until late September it was the usual setup: parked in front of my laptop, terminal open, bossing pi around, fanning out subagents, then eyeballing diffs myself and filing the PR. Glued to the chair all day, every day. Late September I moved the whole thing to my phone, Hermes runs the show, pi takes the orders. My back is very grateful. Three weeks in, still no regrets. Stack: Hermes on flagship brains (gpt-6-astra / opus-5.5), pi on mid-tier (ds-v4.1-flash / sonnet / terra) with as few plugins as possible, the two talking over a2a. Hermes reads the issues, slices them into small tasks, spins up a worktree for each one, and dispatches a pi into it. When a pi finishes it pings Hermes, who decides: ship the PR or bounce it back for rework. I get back from a full day of being a tourist, or just wake up, and a dozen PRs are sitting there done. Pretty sweet. The catch is how black-box the whole thing is. My emotional arc has been a rerun of early vibe coding, except back then I at least read the diffs. Now even that goes to a flagship model. Boxes all the way down. If you don't have data anxiety, grok-bot and chatgpt-dot basically ship this out of the box, grok-cli and codex built in, native agent-to-agent comms. Downside: your code lives on their servers, everything's moderated, and one ban takes it all with it.
