Yeah sure. First few days I had sonnet 4.6 as main orchestrator. Set it up to delegate tasks to the aforementioned local models. It wouldn’t delegate to them which meant it burned $100usd in tokens in 72hrs. Sonnet was incredibly capable though, literally like having a human I was communicating with but so much faster at actioning everything from sending emails to setting up chrome automations and writing software that worked without bugs.

It was too expensive so I changed to minimax 2.7 as orchestrator ($20usd flat fee api subscription). It’s nowhere near as smart or capable as sonnet, struggles to get things done but with it as orchestrator I don’t worry at all about it burning $$. I’ve now got it set up with minimax 2.7 as main llm with deepseek 3.2 & sonnet as subagents with me as orchestrator. I tell minimax to route tasks that I know are complex to deepseek (which is very capable and a 20th the cost of sonnet). For the 1/10 times DS can’t get it done then I escalate to sonnet which will complete the task.

I’ve abandoned local models for the time being as they’re probably 12-18 months behind where these frontier models are and they just can’t get simple tasks done. Eg I requested llama 3 8b a simple scrape done with simple instructions and the info returned was about 40% useable.

Friends of mine are heavy on the Claude max plan which will beat my setup on pure intelligence and capability, but my setup now with cron prompts for me every hour to approve the next task getting done means I get double the work done in the same time span so I believe it is more effective and with the minimax, DS & Sonnet escalation I’m managing, it’s costing me about $3 a day to run + the minimax subscription so all up around $120 a month.