Small team, six devs, and our stack ended up with two Chinese models on API plus one western one. Nobody planned it, it just settled there.

Rough split:

• bulk agent work, self-contained research jobs, long file walks, context rebuilding: the two Chinese ones

• anything where a wrong answer costs us a client conversation: the western one, still

The first group is not a compromise, which is the part i did not expect. One of them is GLM-5.3-Flash, and yes i have seen forty posts telling me ox alpha was GLM-5.3-Flash, we get it, it was ox alpha. We had been routing to it for weeks before any of that, without knowing whose it was, and it held up on our work either way.

Not identical to the western one one on the hardest calls, but close enough that the split is more habit at this point than a line i could defend. On the agent heavy work either of them will do the job.

Curious how other people are drawing that line, because everyone seems to put somewhere slightly different.

NOOOOOOOOOOO

Minmax was the best roleplay model I ever used. I knew it wasn't gonna be permanent, but to see it before taken away really hurts me deeply.

Are there any other free tier models as competent?

Also, I'm planning on paying for the Minmax models. Does anyone have any experience with how the roleplaying costs work out for Minmax M2.7?

Guys Im a very Heavy user and I can easily use 200M+ tokens in one coding session.

I want to ask the experienced Developers how much $ Will be needed for a targeted 1 Billion Tokens a month with these models on OpenRouter but if yyou have any other insight which will help me in cost Reduction Id tak

Context:

Am new to this whole detailed model stuff like previously i just use to code from normal chatgpt chat as i have never worked on a big project.
So currently I have Gemini Pro Subscription (gemini 3.1 pro, 3.6-3.8 flash), ChatGPT plus trial (gpt 5.6 luna,terra,sol), 10$ OpenRouter credit (I can't topup more as am a broke student)

Currently am working on a ML project for a hackathon, so will be mostly coding in Python and its libraries.

So please guide me on:

• Agent/cli to use: I have heard about opencode (OpenChamber), kilo, pi, claude code, etc
• Models to use for planning, coding, reviewing (please prefer a cheap/free model) , like this became so confusing as many suggest this others suggest that.
• What is model effort and what to use for each phase/model
• Specific prompt template for each phase (or should i give the instruction to chatgpt chat and let it write the prompt)
• Skills/Plugin to be efficient and save tokens if any for my usecase
• Anything else that i should learn or know as a beginner

Thanks in advance for your time and guidance

it was usually 1 dollar at least, but now its 10 dollars

Hey everyone,

​I'm trying to add credits via crypto and want to make sure I don't send funds on the wrong chain.

​Older posts mentioned that OpenRouter accepts USDC on Solana, but AI search results only listed Base, Ethereum, and Polygon.

​Could someone who has topped up recently confirm which networks are currently supported for USDC deposits?

​Thanks!

Hey, does anyone know how the OpenRouter discount policy works? Or is it more of a provider thing, but... still, OpenRouter gets a cut. When does the discount end? I'm kinda lost here, really. Shouldn't OpenRouter inform us?

Now that its been over a week since Sonnet batch stopped working (apparently) and without any post about it. OpenRouter has not responded at all since then. But all the info is still on the website. I cannot even submit feedback using the last successful batch IDs. It acts as if they don't exist. Surely I can't be the only one seeing this? I'm fine with Anthropic direct, but it would be nice to know what's up.

Hi everyone,

I’m new to this stuff, so sorry if I’m misunderstanding something.

My task is pretty simple. I extract around 60 Facebook posts per run, and I only need the text.

Before, I was using OpenCode with the free Big Pickle model. I never ran out of usage, and it did the job perfectly.

Now I want to automate this workflow using Hermes installed on my VPS.

The problem is that Big Pickle is only available for free through OpenCode, not through an API. So I tried GLM 5.3 Flash through OpenRouter instead.

The screenshot shows the usage from just ONE run of around 60 Facebook posts.

Am I reading this correctly? Did one simple run really use millions of tokens? That seems like a lot for just extracting text from 60 posts.

I’m not very familiar with tokens, API usage, or how Hermes handles context, so maybe I’m doing something wrong.

If anyone can explain what might be happening or point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you!