A money-saving tip for using LLMs.

Honestly, for most of my workflows these days, DeepSeek V4, GLM 5.3, and Kimi K3 are more than capable.

For the smaller number of genuinely challenging tasks, I still turn to GPT-6 to dig deeper and work out a solution.

Besides keeping the official services as a fallback, I’ve also been using third-party API gateways more often lately. The main appeal is simple: they’re cheap, and some even offer free models.