I pay API rates via OpenRouter / Fireworks, and I find it challenging to hit the $20 mark.
If I was to do anywhere near that kind of work on Anthropic, I'd find myself running out of tokens, waiting days to continue working, and leaning on their el-crap models to try to avoid running out again. This happens all the time.
This way I get to leverage DS for nearly all my work, benefit from its far superior latencies, and I still get to lean on OpenAPI / Anthropic or whatever SOTA models I want when I need them.
The only time that really falls down is if I'm doing huge amounts of real novel work, which hasn't been the case for a while.
If I was to do anywhere near that kind of work on Anthropic, I'd find myself running out of tokens, waiting days to continue working, and leaning on their el-crap models to try to avoid running out again. This happens all the time.
This way I get to leverage DS for nearly all my work, benefit from its far superior latencies, and I still get to lean on OpenAPI / Anthropic or whatever SOTA models I want when I need them.
The only time that really falls down is if I'm doing huge amounts of real novel work, which hasn't been the case for a while.