My Quest for the Most Cost-Effective AI Tools

At my day job, I have access to unlimited Claude. It's a fantastic tool, and it has become an integral part of my workflow. But it also got me thinking: could I replicate this experience for my personal projects without breaking the bank?

This question sparked a journey to find the most cost-effective AI coding assistant, a quest to see if the free and cheap alternatives could hold their own against the corporate giants.

This post is me sharing what I tried and what actually worked for me. Not a formal evaluation.

TL;DR: The Best Bang for my Buck

• Free: Qwen CLI is a simple, no-frills Claude Code alternative.
• Cheap: DeepSeek API gives the most value for the cost.
• Value: GitHub Copilot is worth it for the commit messages alone.
• All-in-One: ChatGPT Plus (with Codex CLI) is feature-heavy and flexible.

How This Started: Chatbot -> Roo Code -> Claude Code

Before any of this, I was using AI in the most basic way. Copy code into a chatbot, explain what I want, paste the output back into VS Code. It's fine at first, until the input gets bigger.

The turning point was a work task where I had to write hundreds of unit tests. There was no way I was manually pasting every file into a chatbot. That's when I finally gave in and tried Roo Code.

Roo Code was my first taste of something "agent-like". It could automatically read my files, propose changes, and I like the checkpoint feature. It still needed constant prompting, and sometimes I had to remind it of the folder structure, but it was good enough that I stopped manually copy-pasting.

Then I tried Claude Code.

Claude Code didn't feel like an "AI assistant". It felt like delegating work to another developer. It does everything end-to-end: reads the repo, plans the changes, runs tasks, and doesn't nag me every two steps. After trying that, I couldn't go back (to non-agentic development).

So now every tool I try, I ask one question: "How close is this to Claude Code without me spending like corporate?"

The "Free is Free" Tier: Can You Code for Free?

I started with the free tools first, just to see how far I could get without spending anything.

NVIDIA NIMs (40 req/min)

I tested two of their stronger models, kimi k2 0905 instruct and qwen3 coder 480b instruct. Both were surprisingly good for a free tier. The response times were fast and the suggestions were usable. It also made me think about how good the open-source scene is getting. When GPUs drop in price, I'd really like to self-host some of these.

Qwen CLI (2000 req/day)

Qwen CLI was basically my attempt to recreate the Claude Code experience at home for free. It's not as proactive or as "aware" as Claude, but if I already know what I want, Qwen gets it done. When I was building TACOS, my personal FastAPI backend and RAG setup, I used Qwen CLI for things like generating documentation and some of the query expansion logic. It doesn't try to be fancy and just works.

Gemini CLI (1000 req/day)

I tried the Gemini CLI too. gemini-2.5-pro is a strong model, but it doesn't feel tuned for CLI or agent-style workflows. I mostly used it for the great detailed planning and explanations. There's a trick involving a self-hosted OpenAI-compatible wrapper, but otherwise I didn't use it much for agentic coding.

The "Almost Free" Tier: Cheap and Surprisingly Good

This was where I started finding real bangs for bucks.

DeepSeek API ($2 in credits)

I had $2 in DeepSeek credits and decided to pair it with Roo Code while building TACOS. I used:

• deepseek-reasoner for planning and explanation
• deepseek-chat for coding

After 3 days of building the whole backend and RAG pipeline, I checked my usage and saw I had spent slightly over $1.50. I realized I had been overestimating how much "AI usage" I needed. If this was what I got for less than $2, I wanted to see what else I could squeeze out of the free and cheap tiers.

OpenRouter API ($10 top-up)

OpenRouter lets you try a wide variety of models like:

• gpt-120b-oss
• deepseek-r1
• qwen3 family
• kimi k2
• glm

The free tier is small: 50 requests per day. But if you top up at least $10, you suddenly get 1000 requests per day. The credits last a year and you can use it for the more OP models. I mainly use OpenRouter now to try models without committing to anything.

Z.ai ($3/month)

I haven't tried z.ai yet, but it's $3 a month and offers the glm-4.6 model, which had good reviews so it's on my watchlist for sure. If I ever run out of free tiers or DeepSeek credits or OpenRouter credits, this is probably where I go next. It’s hard to argue with $3.

The "Not Bad Value" Tier: Paying for Convenience

After trying so many free and cheap tools, I wanted to see what the "nice" paid tools felt like again.

GitHub Copilot ($10/month)

I didn't realize how much I relied on Copilot in VS code until my free quota ran out. The inline suggestions and tab completions are great, but the feature that stuck with me the most was the commit message generator. One clean, semantic, conventional one-liners, no tweaking needed. I tried alternatives like Commit Sage, but they didn't hit the same spot. Before the free tier refreshed, I really considered paying for it.

Pair this with the fact you can use it with Roo Code for unlimited gpt-5-mini and its insane value.

ChatGPT Plus (with Codex CLI) ($20/month)

I signed up mainly to try the Codex CLI because it was described as Claude Code's closest competitor. It ended up having more features than I expected:

• Codex on the web
• GitHub repo integration
• a pretty good VS Code extension
• and the upgraded ChatGPT apps now supporting agents

Just for fun, I asked the agent on my iOS app to visit this website and take a screenshot. It actually did it. That’s crazy.

Right now, Codex CLI is the tool I'm most interested in and experimenting with.

Quick Summary

Conclusion: My Quest for the Best Bangs for the Bucks

After testing all these tools, the main thing I learned is that AI coding doesn't have to be expensive. Free and cheap tools take you surprisingly far, and sometimes the experience is close enough to corporate-level tools that I don’t miss much.

If you want something free and “just works”, Qwen CLI and NVIDIA NIMs API are solid. If you want the best value for money, the DeepSeek API is unbeatable.
If convenience and a nicer UI/UX matters, GitHub Copilot is worth thinking about.
And if you want something close to Claude Code without spending too much, ChatGPT Plus and Codex CLI is probably the best balance of price and experience right now.

I'm still experimenting, but if you've tried any nice tools or have your own secret setup, feel free to share with me.

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Cheers,
Ted