I dislike how Zen (and many similar cases, not picking on Zen here) report being not for profit or transparent, while the auto-recharge mechanism guarantees they are sitting on a float of at least $5 per account, and presumably an average of at least $10. That's something like 50 cents of interest income per year per account. It's not nothing and it's hardly egregious fraud, but I feel if they will do this when it's obvious what they're doing, what other corners might they cut
replyHonesty as a marketing strategy is really undervalued in cases like this
Yeah man, it's a grand scheme to skim 50 cents off you per year. All combined, that might be just enough to cover their website hosting costs.
replyhonestly the issue with Zen is that they collect and might sell your data
replyHow does Claude Code compare to OpenCode Zen? I’m on the $20/month Claude plan, and was considering OpenCode Zen as well.
replyDue to the quota changes, I actually find myself using Claude less and less
I mostly use Opus via Copilot with opencode, and I'll tell you, in the past few days, I've had long sessions (almost the whole day) without hitting rate limits. That's very different from Claude Code, which used to rate-limit me before even halfway through the day.
replyJust cancelled my Claude plan, so that I can switch over when it expires in a week. The usage limits somehow just make me less productive with it.
replyI haven't tried $20 claude code recently, but I've used OpenCode Zen primarily so I can play with opensource/chinese models which are very inexpensive. I'd spend $0.50-$1.00 on a single claude opus 4.6 plan mode run, then have a chinese model execute the plan for like $0.10-$0.15 total. I'd keep context short, constantly start new threads, and get laser focused markdown plans and knowledgebase to be token efficient.
replyIf I just let opencode zen run claude opus to plan and execute, I'd spend $20 in like 5 minutes lol
Which chinese models do you use and do you use any for specific tasks?
replykimi k2.5 works quite well and is super fast. Much faster than opus but not quite at the same quality level.
replyWhenever a new one comes out, there's a good chance they're free for a week on Zen, so I try out any free ones. For example, MiniMax M2.5 and Qwen 3.6+ are free right now.
replyPersonally, I've had a lot of good results in my little personal projects with Kimi K2.5, GLM 5 and 5.1, and MiniMax M2.5.