OpenAI do have codex models, which are half the price. I haven't used them enough to comment on the quality though.
I remember them saying a few years ago that, they didn't think it was worth specializing models for code, because their general purpose models kept beating them. I guess they changed their mind? Since they did start making codex models again.
I use this model. It's pretty good but not Opus 4.8 or Fable levels obviously. I'm really hoping we get more models like it (and better) soon. I run it locally and it's great that way.
Qwen3-coder-next is very usable. But I don't think it's as good as Qwen3.6-27B (though it does run faster on my hardware). It would be great if we could get a Qwen3.7-coder, but I'm not going to hold my breath.