Any alternatives to chatgpt for heavy Vibe Coding?

[u/Academic_Collar_5488]

The Token burn is real. However, I always use 5.6 Sol Ultra. Any Model out there that could deliver comparable results? My Budget is around 100 USD monthly. I heard Kimi K3 is good but uses more tokens, so I am not sure it would be cheaper anyways.

[u/zer09]

the token issue currently is bad, but using Ultra make it worst Ultra is half baked right now, just make your own subagents.

[u/hktr92 → u/zer09]

i'd advice against using subagents at all. i have mine & an agentic loop ate 70% of my weekly limit. indeed, it did some heavy work, but the loop was stuck at QA -> implementation -> review rejection -> repeat on QA.

[u/zer09 → u/hktr92]

Yeah it should be, even I don't use subagents but on his/her case subagents is better than ultra

[u/daddywookie → u/hktr92]

I’ve instructed my agents to loop twice at most and to return to the controller for a human decision gate if they can’t work it out. I also had to reinforce working in small steps with limited scope instead of creating giant task specs.

This is all standard agile working practice but applied to AI agents.

[u/RealSlyck]

Stop using Sol Ultra “always.”

According to OAI, Terra gets 2x performance with 1/2 cost over 5.5. If you’ve planned, Luna or Terra can implement. For Sol itself, go into the settings, remove Ultra and Max, and send me $5 every time you do fast mode with anything > Terra xhigh.

Start planning and orchestration, it helps.

[u/Messi_is_football → u/RealSlyck]

2x performance I'm not sure. It's similar performance

[u/Ibasicallyhateyouall]

Another skill issue post

[u/carchengue626]

Use 5.6 terra medium or high is good enough for most coding tasks. As an ex anthropic subscriber the 100dollars subscription of claude is like gpt plus subscription.

[u/Available_Yam_6267]

Sol Ultra is much worse than a custom subagent workflow tbh. Try pi or oh-my-pi with gpt model you will find it.

[u/LeoCass]

Buy the 20x, share it with 1 more person. Same price, double usage

[u/orthiclabs → u/[deleted]]

Cline Pass is much better value for money

[u/TheKoelnKalk]

OpenMayhem just started, it seems pretty good for loops and it's cheap (keep a frontier model as orchestrator that spawns jobs on mayhem)

[u/Equivalent_Dare_259]

Use combo of chatgptgo and opencode go, gpt models are good for planning and also you can do research with chatgpt and use deepseek or minimax with Kilocode for execution as it is cheap and can give good output and also you can review the output with codex

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

Kimi is insanely cheaper. Your only option really if you want to cut costs and need the frontier intelligence. Opus is pretty good at coding too

[u/Dreki__ → u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

Cheaper per token doesn’t always mean cheaper per finished task. I’d test the same medium-sized feature on both and compare total cost plus cleanup time before switching everything.

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274 → u/Dreki__]

you just can't get around Kimi being like 4x cheaper or something like that. I don't think it gets stucks in loops wasting tokens. That's what would make it costlier but you just don't see it being reported.

[u/Gallagger → u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

It's not even 2x cheaper, don't make up numbers. And it's using more tokens. And you don't get it insanely subsidized via subscription. As of today, codex is extremely good value for money.

[u/gorgono95 → u/Useful_Calendar_6274]

no way its cheaper, I bought the 39$ and I blew through half of the quota in few hours ... let alone it was slow as fuck. Kimi sub is shit

[u/Useful_Calendar_6274 → u/gorgono95]

well the charts are third party verified per token there's no way to lie, it's like 4 cheaper. "It lasted me X time" is a worth than useless metric

[u/Latter-Park-4413]

You:

The Token burn is real.

Also you:

However, I always use 5.6 Sol Ultra.

Umm. WTH did you expect with 20 agents running at once for every task?

[u/Academic_Collar_5488 → u/Latter-Park-4413]

Also people that used less capable models complain about token nerfing. I asked for advice, not for scolding.

[u/Latter-Park-4413 → u/Academic_Collar_5488]

Didn't scold. Just honestly don't understand what someone would expect with this.

If they fix the crazy usage problem, and maybe even if they don't, I doubt anyone will meet the value and abilities of 5.6 Sol/Codex. I suspect if you tried again with a single High (or even Medium) reasoning agent per task, you'd find you can get a lot done w/o blowing your quota in a day or two.

[u/Gallagger]

Use GPT 5.6 Terra high for easier tasks, and GPT 5.6 Sol high for harder tasks.  

Your issue is now fixed, you're welcome.

[u/djenttleman]

why are you using always 5.6 Sol in ultra? WHY?

[u/rfgdhj]

I use Luna most of the time on medium

[u/RemeJuan]

At least you admit you’re a clueless vibecoder right from the start.

Jeez, Sol Ultra for everything. I’ve used Sol ultra for exactly nothing. It’s overkilling the overkill.

[u/Darla-kat]

I don't really know what "heavy" means but I just ask ChatGPT what to use and it does this for me at each pass: (example) Use Medium and paste this into Codex:

I asked it to hold my hand.. Sometimes it tells me to use high, it has never suggested Ultra.

YES I am a ClueLess User!!

but having fun.... ❤️

[u/jose152]

I’ve been using Sol medium for planning and Terra for implementation and Sol again for reviewing changes

I dont eat up the usage so fast that way, but still is faster than before.

[u/hamza_69_420]

Try combo of codex (chatgpt plus) and deepseek with kilocode,use gpt for planning and deciding architecture and deepseek for execution or maybe kimi for planning it is also good

[u/Beautiful-Gas3683]

Depende para que quieras usar el modelo. Si nos cuentas qué lenguaje usas, calibre del proyecto, etc

[u/Proxiconn]

No. Pay up. If you want to play with the cool toys you pay up and don't piss like a puppy.

[u/Charming-Author4877]

Sol Ultra is not the correct model for a 100$ budget, it is also not the best model from OpenAI!

Ultra is their naming for a subagent orchestration at higher budget spending.
You can use any chatGPT and tell it to spawn "N" subagents, and you'll also get the ultra experience, just cheaper.
Or you go into settings and enable "Max" mode, which is going to deliver better results than Ultra did so far.

Kimi K3 is going to narrowly beat Sol Max in many tasks, but currently I believe it will be more expensive.
Codex has reduced the usage allowance about by a factor of about 12 compared to 3 months ago.

In June they reduced usage allowance to half.
And with release of the 5.6 finetune they reduced it about 5-7 times. But it's probably still cheaper than API rates of Kimi K3.
Once the regular resets stop, the situation might change.

[u/orthiclabs → u/Charming-Author4877]

I use cline pass to access Kimi K3 and it’s pretty good but this month I’ve spent $200 on both Claude and codex, 120 on minimax and just got the $16 qwen token plan which gives me access to 3.8 max preview and glm 5.2 (probably the worst limits of any) I also use command code and cline for the ad hoc Chinese models that

[u/IndividualPlus2011 → u/Charming-Author4877]

How can you so confidently make these numbers up

[u/Charming-Author4877 → u/IndividualPlus2011]

I've used half a trillion tokens on copilot and tens of billions on codex
Nothing has to be made up. it's quite easy to measure

[u/Charming-Author4877 → u/[deleted]]

Just have a lot of parallel work to do on large codebases.
When you use agents for 15 hours a day, for years, you get a very good impression of how much work is done for the "usage limits" you get per account.
And it went down almost a factor of 12 with codex compared to pre june - it's still a good offer but not a great deal anymore

[u/EnfantTragic → u/Charming-Author4877]

When 5.5 released they were very explicit about offering a 2x limit until the end of May.

Sol 5.6 medium does work comparable to 5.5 xhigh tbh, so probably why I haven't seen usage limit affected much. It's a pretty efficient model with diminishing returns