> * it chews through $5 in minutes*

Whoa, if you're using it that much, you should definitely look at the $100 plan. Either that, or you'll have to use an older model or reduce thinking (which does really tank the quality of results unfortunately) or look at a local model. I don't think there's really many other options.

For a while I did a $20 sub to both OpenAI and Claude and just switched back and forth. I was able to get pretty far that way, but it can feel a bit disruptive.