Ask HN: How are you getting inference for personal projects?
It seems like the major providers are starting to cut back the usage included with their monthly subscriptions. How are people handling inference for side projects these days?
Are you still using Codex/Claude subscriptions, paying for hosted open weight models, running local models, etc
I use Cursor, and in fact, their internal models are more than enough for me. Especially considering that Grok bot has recently been released; it has its own limits and also helps save Cursor tokens (by properly drafting technical specifications and making edits to tasks). I pay $60 per month for the subscription, sometimes $200 if there are a lot of technical tasks
In order to have an efficient use of tokens, I created proper documentation from the start of the project:
- What component is where, what it does and how it does it
- Kept a history of all the architectural decisions
- How a new component (of a known type) should be added to the system
- Instructed the agent to keep this information valid and up to date as part of the PR prerequisites.
I've been on the Claude Max plan for quite a while now but I also run my own local models and every week there are new local models that are slowly but very surely closing the gap to frontier-level quality and so, pretty soon, I won't use APIs at all. Can't wait!
Claude subscription (the cheapest $20/month one) -- I very rarely hit the limits, particularly the weekly ones. But then again, the largest codebase I ever work on is 50k lines.
I'd prefer local models massively for both work and "pleasure" (I love LLMs as random cognitive sparring partners), but then again, my bank account massively disagrees :/
I'd prefer local models massively for both work and "pleasure" (I love LLMs as random cognitive sparring partners), but then again, my bank account massively disagrees :/