I realized the other day that I had a $30 a month Claude subscription. So, I fired it up all excited and tried Opus 5.5 on a codebase I was already in with DS. After about 30 minutes I hit a 5 hour limit. The next day I tried again and the same thing happened. And it felt much slower to boot. I was super disappointed.
In my experience a single 5 hour allowance in the 20eur Claude plan equals about $5-10 in Deepseek 4.1 Flash API usage. DS is a lot more token hungry and takes 3x-4x longer. The subscription is way cheaper, probably around $200/month worth of DS, just stick to Opus low and Sonnet for most tasks.
and how are costs like for your usual workflows/etc.?
But it's slow.
I don't think I can any longer appreciate any major difference in "intelligence" between models for most tasks but Opus is consistently much faster than competitors at finishing tasks and keeping me in the loop.
Of course excluding ultra code, the you will wait 50 minutes for a minor refactor.
And that was 6.1 sol xhigh, not astra max..
Don't use frontier models like this for problems that can be solved with flash models, and you'll see API pricing isn't that terrible. Still cheaper than anything with remotely this level of capability 2.5 months ago.
Paying API prices for Deepseek 4.1 Flash feels like a much better deal at the moment.
Are you using k3 with thinking set to the absolute highest and only using k3 for everything?
I think Kimi just doesn't have the means to subsidize plans.
Here's mine: https://pi.dev/packages/@arcanemachine/pi-model-switcher
I have mine configured to use a "thinker" model for planning and decision making, and a "doer" model for the easy stuff (digging around the repo, writing code based on the thinker's instructions, etc.).