At the beginning of June I decided to run an experiment: see if I can replace my $100 Claude subscription with something cheaper – but still keep the Claude Code harness, and at least a similar quality level.
Almost 2 months later, I’m happy to report that I successfully cancelled Claude, and I’m running a combo of Grok-4.5, GPT-5.6, MiniMax M3 and Open Code free models. Same level of productivity, maybe slightly better.
Total monthly bill: $80.
Here’s the breakdown: $35 Super Grok, $25 MiniMax M3 Token Plus plan, $20 vanilla GPT subscription (includes the Codex starter package).
Now, the limits for these, taken separately, are not great. Except MiniMax M3, the other 2 seem to eat tokens for breakfast. That’s just one of the things I discovered during the experiment. There are a couple more that I want to share, so, here are my thoughts on how you can actually run Fable level inference, with decent limits, for the monthly cost of one gas tank refill for your SUV.
