This is a very common sequence of events.
The frontier hosted models are so much better than everything else that it's not worth messing around with anything lesser if doing this professionally. The $20/month plans go a long way if context is managed carefully. For a professional developer or consultant, the $200/month plan is peanuts relative to compensation.
Unless you include it in "frontier", but that has usually been used to refer to "Big 3".
(At todays ram prices upgrading to that for me would pay for a _lot_ of tokens...)
Kimi K2.5 is good, but it's still behind the main models like Claude's offerings and GPT-5.2. Yes, I know what the benchmarks say, but the benchmarks for open weight models have been overpromising for a long time and Kimi K2.5 is no exception.
Kimi K2.5 is also not something you can easily run locally without investing $5-10K or more. There are hosted options you can pay for, but like the parent commenter observed: By the time you're pinching pennies on LLM costs, what are you even achieving? I could see how it could make sense for students or people who aren't doing this professionally, but anyone doing this professionally really should skip straight to the best models available.
Unless you're billing hourly and looking for excuses to generate more work I guess?
I've also been testing OpenClaw. It burned 8M tokens during my half hour of testing, which would have been like $50 with Opus on the API. (Which is why everyone was using it with the sub, until Anthropic apparently banned that.)
I was using GLM on Cerebras instead, so it was only $10 per half hour ;) Tried to get their Coding plan ("unlimited" for $50/mo) but sold out...
(My fallback is I got a whole year of GLM from ZAI for $20 for the year, it's just a bit too slow for interactive use.)