I've been on the API-only mentality for months and all the open models were definitely the stuff I loved the most. Kimi K2.5, 2.7 and Deepseek v4 were among my favorites, while sparingly using Opus or whatever OpenAI had for specific situations.
But ever since I've switched to one of the $100-tier subs, I can see why a lot of the people on it don't really discuss the open models often. I'd still use it especially when it comes to sensitive inputs, but for most work, what you get on OpenAI or Anthropic is really more than enough.
It really got even better when they also made their cheaper models up to par if not better than the open models.
I do think the crowd for open models are out there, especially when you see trillions of tokens running for them on OpenCode or OpenRouter leaderboards.
But ever since I've switched to one of the $100-tier subs, I can see why a lot of the people on it don't really discuss the open models often. I'd still use it especially when it comes to sensitive inputs, but for most work, what you get on OpenAI or Anthropic is really more than enough.
It really got even better when they also made their cheaper models up to par if not better than the open models.
I do think the crowd for open models are out there, especially when you see trillions of tokens running for them on OpenCode or OpenRouter leaderboards.