> The best thing for consumers would be if all these model providers strictly provided usage-based API pricing
Using openrouter myself I find the costs of APIs to be extremely low and affordable? I don't send the whole codebase to every question, I just ask about what I need, and everything is actually ridiculously cheap? $20 lasts about 3 months.
I don't actually think Claude Code is very good and this is exactly why. It's not really optimized to use its tools efficiently. I think Cursor probably does a better job of that but I imagine all of these coding assistants will come with some form of local tooling support in the way of vector DBs etc one day.
I have not had the same experience. I pay 10 dollars a month for GitHub Copilot, where I get to use Claude Sonnet 4.5.
I tried the same with OpenRouter and I used up 2.5 dollars in a day using Sonnet 4.5. Similar use on copilot has could maybe make me use 10% of my quota (and that's being generous for OpenRouter).
I think GitHub Copilot is way more affordable than OpenRouter.
I tried to plug CC on my OpenRouter account, and just asking it what my project was doing (a directory containing three .sh of around 100 LOC each), I saw like 20 API requests to OpenRouter accounting for almost $1 in total.
Meanwhile copy/pasting those shells in OpenRouter's Chat and asking the same question resulted in a single API request costing a tenth of a cent.
I could probably try tuning everything to keep costs down, but idk if it's worth the efforts.