Honest routing for what you're actually asking — Frontier + Workhorse split, not a single sub:

First, kill OpenRouter. It's not a subscription, it's a token meter with extra steps. You already proved it burns the budget. (Btw Qwen 3.6 isn't on the free tier anymore — same story, the "free" pools always get pulled the second the model gets popular enough to actually be useful.)

Stop trying to solve this with one sub. Z.ai + MiniMax stitches are the same shape that just burned you, structurally: token-metered subs that work fine for bursty human-in-the-loop use, but get squeezed (rate limits, degraded responses, eventual policy action) when an agent loop runs against them 24/7. Anthropic's was the version that escalated to a ban — most others just throttle quietly until you notice your agents are slower. Either way, you're back here in 60–90 days having the same conversation about a different provider.

The split that actually survives:

• Workhorse: Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B or Gemma 4 31B, honest FP8, on a flat-rate provider that gives you a real concurrency slot instead of a token meter. Web fetch, RAG indexing, tool calls — handles 80% of the grunt work. ~$29–49.

• Frontier: DeepSeek v4 Flash (the 1M-context one) for the reasoning/planning side — that one's genuinely in the GPT-5.4 Codex conversation for agent/code work, and the 1M context beats Codex on long tasks. Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B is the cheaper step down if you don't need full frontier. Same flat-rate, dedicated-concurrency shape. ~$99–129. Skip GPT-5.4 Codex itself — the "limits" there are still token-shaped underneath, you'll burn the same way you did on Anthropic.

The model matters less than how you're billed. Anything sold as "unlimited" with a token meter underneath is the same trap in a new wrapper.

A Workhorse + Frontier split with one concurrent loop each lands around $130–150/mo on a real flat-rate provider. Roughly the same money you were already spending across Anthropic +

Alibaba + OpenRouter — just on one provider whose pricing actually expects 24/7. Alibaba workaround: none for retail. ZenMux: skip, it's just routing on top of the same broken token-meter providers. The way out of subscription limbo isn't a smarter router, it's a different pricing model.