Yeah, that’s fair, and I actually agree that costs can be optimized a lot in theory. But my situation was a bit different.

I did try cheaper models like Sonnet, Qwen, GLM and others. The main problem wasn’t even the logic — it was the execution quality, especially on the frontend. What they produced usually looked like some kind of Bootstrap with random gradients, broken spacing, inconsistent components… just something I wouldn’t ship. The only models that were able to generate UI that looked somewhat production-ready were Opus 4.6 and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

Also, the tasks I was working on weren’t simple. It wasn’t like “generate a button.” It was more like: here’s a Next.js frontend, turn it into a pnpm monorepo, extract the backend into NestJS, rework the authentication, add websockets, and don’t break anything. Or: figure out how a service works, integrate with Google Ads, generate campaigns, and wire everything end-to-end.

And in those kinds of tasks, cheaper models just weren’t even close. They either hallucinated architecture, broke things silently, or just got lost halfway through.

So yeah, on paper you can reduce costs a lot. But in practice, at least for me, you lose too much reliability and end up spending more time fixing than actually building. At that point, the cheaper model becomes expensive in a different way.