My budget right now is ~$10/month, so my choices are based on cost, and the ability to get shit done. I’ve been using Opencode.
preference ranked descending
opencode/big-pickle
All around, this is my current favorite. This one has been good at helping me find bugs. When I have it write code to fix a bug, new bugs often occur as side effects. It’s good at fixing the side effects too, but sometimes it takes a few attempts. I’ve seen improvements when I give the AI instructions in AGENTS.md such as, “validate all code before considering it done.” In AGENTS.md, I included examples of using tsc and svelte-check and that seemed to help.
opencode-go/kimi-k2.5
This one seems good at everything. I’ve made a couple game prototypes (rust & typescript) with this and I was pleased. It usually fails the first few times, but I feed it the errors I see in my console and it eventually gets it right. The problem? Too much money. I have to spend about $5 a day to use it, which is over my budget.
poolside/laguna-sx.2:free
Word of warning, it’s nothing short of a loose cannon. It needs a lot more instruction and it often duplicates work, makes mistakes, deletes things it shouldn’t, violates explicit policies outlined in AGENTS.md, but it is capable of completing many small tasks and implementing simple features. If you use it, make sure you audit it’s output closely.
openrouter/z-ai/glm-4.5-air:free
Models I no longer use
openrouter/free
Let’s be real— this one is pretty bad. It returns large chunks of text in the thinking output for seemingly no reason. Sometimes it stops before the task is done. It’s really inconsistent because every request may be using a different model behind the scenes. It’s OK for autocomplete type tasks, but not good for implementing features.
inclusionai/ling-2.6-flash
Formerly called openrouter/elephant-alpha, this one is unusually fast, and it’s low cost, but it does a lot of bullshitting which limits it’s usefulness.
openrouter/minimax/minimax-m2.5:free
This one seems like it could be good, but it regularly stops mid-thought. I am forced to re-send the query, but it stops mid-thought again. Is there some sort of limiter on this guy?