I haven't been able to run out of usage on the $100 plan with Opus 5.5. The model runs fast and gives me good results (I'm using it for coding). Prior to that I was on the OpenAI $200 plan; I jumped ship because I was burning through Astra usage in like 2 days.

I've played with some of the open models (GLM, DeepSeek Flash), but none of them have matched the results I get with Opus or Astra or (and a big jump down here) Sol.

What models should we be using? I have found it as good as Fable 5.1 for a lot of what I am doing at lower cost and decent speed. Where what I am doing it making reports, building small data pipelines, analyzing a large (millions of lines of code), code base.

subscription on claude code — usually inside the weekly limit. opus 5.5 for me felt better than any other model. not exactly on coding but rather it feels more pro-active. beside just doing a task it often provides insights besides the scope of the task but adjacent. like: look the llm provider apis have different priority queues. also it deals w/ vague instructions quite good and takes initiative. Astra in comparison is very autistic and follows instructions to the letter and rarely provide insights if not asked. Opus 5.5 is enjoyment to work with.

I've been a Claude Boi since December of 2025. A month or so ago, I decided to give ChatGPT a good go just to see how it properly compares. I've used a variety of models in a variety of contexts prior to this, but I figured with Astra out I had a good excuse to make it my "daily driver."

GPT is good. I actually really like Sol 6.1. It works fine. But I just switched back to Claude a few days ago and damn, Opus 5.5 is just better.

> 3) do you think you get better results.

It does. I really like to get my money's worth out of these things, so I'm constantly throwing stuff at these models while I have usage. The main things I've noticed is that Claude is much better at handling my more technical work "properly" compared to GPT. It has a certain "intuition" that makes a lot of sense to me; like someone with a lot of years of experience. Sol 6.1, on the other hand, is like someone who is very "booksmart" and knows how to do things in theory, but fails to grasp the "why" we do things often. You can really start to see how they diverge over long running, iterative tasks. Claude is just better at maintaining things as it goes. Sol starts to fall apart quickly if it didn't nail things on the first try.

> 2) you don't care about money because you ain't paying it

Despite being a very technical user, I have a hard time using up my usage. Maybe I'm not as hard-core a dev I thought I was, but if you're paying for more than just the $20 plan, I have hard time understanding what you're doing to have to really worry about usage.

I don’t even use half my Team Plan with Opus 5.5 high so I don’t care using a cheaper model. I’m not even limited by the speed of it (I’m compiler bound…).

It's the best model I've found for general coding and the $200 plan is enough for me to never run out of (sometimes if I do especially a lot I'll run out after about 5 days, but usually it's fine).

I can make it's usage fit inside my companies budgets and it produces noticeably better code that Sol 6.1 and needs less handloading because of that.

If the code doesn't matter and it's not that hard, Sol is fine and much cheaper.

Better results than what? Opus 5? Then definitely.

But probably the answer to your question is subscription subsidization. With that, Opus 5.5 is SOTA and extremely cheap.

other models that produce exact same results (for coding results only)

This is obviously not true. They are better or worse across many dimensions.

I don't have time to do a bunch of testing and optimization over which model to use for what task. I find Opus is the best that I regularly use so I stick with it until I have a task where I'm likely to spend more on it than I want to.

Versus which models? Sonnet? Astra? Sol?

If youre on a sub claude and chatgpt cost pretty much the same as comparable open models