With the release of Qwen 3.8 Max and it's insane 98% discount during 'off-peak' hours and 90% discount during regular hours, I decided to download Qoder to give it a go.
For reference, Qoder is essentially Antigravity, but by Alibaba and it blew my mind. Whether it's the fact that they've been throwing freebies at me since I downloaded it (100 usd worth of free SOTA 'ultimate' calls, refreshing every 2 days sofar till the 30th), or the 300 credit 'pro-trial', which goes a LOOOOONG way when you use Qwen 3.8 Max at the 98% discount. Or the fact that Lite mode is free! Like actually free, I've pushed over 20k LOC edits through it today and it hasnt even hit a fair-use cap?
I've been trying out the different platforms lately to see what's the most cost-effective, as my day-job comes with Claude Code, which is great for that, but for any personal projects, that's on my budget, with my accounts. I've been using APIs from various providers to see which is cheaper, more capable, using freebies where possible (eg. Google Startup and Azure Startup free credits) and while they work great while free, reviewing the bill afterwards is why I push them so hard... For perspective, $500 of Azure freebie money for around 50k LOC editing via OpenAI API with the model-router (discounted and routes to the cheapest model that can do the task). $150 in Google freebie money for around 20 LOC editing via Gemini 3.6 flash on Low thinking. Vs 40k LOC on $10 via Qoder (using Qwen 3.8 discounted rate), or $100 for 20k LOC via Ultimate (the expensive one).
Previously, Chinese models were 'decent', but often fell short of their western counterparts, that changed this month... Qwen and Kimi are officially better than anything in their price range, infact they punch high enough that they're the best value for twice their price range at least.
But dont take my word for it, Download Qoder and give it a try yourself. Unlike the western platforms that hide what the actual cost is till you're slapped with a bill and even then they dont actually give you clean breakdowns, Qoder is shockingly open with their free trials, showing you a detailed breakdown of what each task would have cost you. In the modern day of 'gotcha' bills because 'it takes us a while to calculate how much it costs you', Alibaba shows that it's cloak and dagger tactics to nail you with bills you cant predict. Transparent pricing and transparent usages, live. There's no excuse anymore Google and Microsoft, give us live-stats on usages.
Sorry for the poor format, lack of polish, etc. I'm knee deep in work and dont have much time to read or write, but I still wanted to put word out. If you havent downloaded Qoder yet, seriously give it a try. If you like it, you like it, if you dont, it's completely free to try.
P.S. Give the Better Loops feature a try. It's essentially a routine they built that analyzes your codebase for flaws and gives you a breakdown on it with easy to fire scoped 'quests' to fix them. They also have a 'generate wikis' routine, that's actually pretty cool. They treat documenting the codebase as codebase context which is brilliant! Instead of wasting token generating a wiki for people to read, it's actively used to prevent drift.
Top comments (14)
Haven't touched Qoder but I've been living in Qwen the last couple weeks anyway ā Qwen3-TTS for a voice cloning pipeline, Qwen Cloud for an invoice-reconciliation agent I built for a hackathon. Same story on pricing from the API side and the quality gap you're describing is real, not hype.
Might actually download Qoder just to see that live cost breakdown you mentioned ā that's the part nobody else does.
Definitely give Qoder a try. Could be subjective, but I find that for long-horizon tasks, it does a much better job staying consistent. Eg. I told it to start pushing to git, that was 20 prompts ago and in that time it's written over 50k LOC on Lite, the tier that's supposed to be bad? I've also been hammering Lite, fully free and it's blowing my mind how I've never heard of this platform yet! Seriously, it's worth downloading for the Better Loop and Wiki Generator alone. Every other AI orchestrator platform has just been a copy-paste of eachother, Qoder is the first 1 I found that actually adds value from a platform side. Also it's fully free for BYOK (havent dug too much, but looks like just Chinese models supported), but still cool that it's available for free with what I'd describe as the most robust orchestration layer I've seen to date. The models dont drift and they've been exceptionally consistent with writing unit tests. It also picked up gaps that Sonnet, Opus, Gemini Pro, GTP SOL, all missed. That alone makes it worth giving a shot atleast.
Do note, all of this is my honest, unaffiliated opinion. I wholeheartedly recommend giving Qoder a try
50k LOC over 20 prompts on the free tier without drift is the number that'll actually get me to download it... Thanks
And the usage isnt hidden in some obscure subsystem. You click on your usage, you click view details, it takes you to this page.
And to just show you I'm not kidding about it actually being LIVE usage stats.
the screenshots land better than the free-tier claim did .
Quest Mode showing the same log format on both Lite and Ultimate means it's not a stripped-down free version, it's the same system with a different bill attached.
$5.76 for 38 minutes on Ultimate is the number I'd actually budget against, not the $0.00 rows. Is that Ultimate rate pre- or post-discount??
Ultimate isnt discounted at all. Those were free Ultimate calls they gave (200 to claim once off, 1000 every 2nd day sofar. Ultimate is priced at 1x credit rate, whereas different tiered models work at different % of credit rate. Eg. Qwen 3.8 Max is at 90% discount during peak hours, 98% off-peak. Translating to 0.1 and 0.01x credit rate respectively. But I get what you mean.
Here's some I did during off-peak. So they show real rate and the discounted rate. Qwen charges directly to credits, which I used via the pro-trial, so these are the real numbers you'd get billed, with vs without (striked out) the discount.
Pay attention to rate before vs after 4pm. Off-peak by me translates to 4pm-2am.
I read it wrongly. The 90/98 split you're describing is the actual mechanism and it's more interesting than what I had: the discount is tied to when you run the model, not which tier you bought.
that's less "this platform is cheap" and more "this is cheap if you can schedule around Alibaba's off-peak window."
Does Qoder let you queue a task to fire after 4pm automatically or is timing it on you manually???
The live cost breakdown is the part Iād trust more than the headline model ranking. For personal projects, the failure mode is usually not 'can it edit 20k LOC once'; it is whether the tool keeps a clean diff, remembers the constraint, and makes the next rollback obvious when it gets too confident.
It does an honestly exceptional job. To put in perspective, I threw it at Dwarven Stronghold on Lite mode. That's a 150k LOC Rust codebase, with deeply integrated simulation logic and over 700 Tests. It keeps it accurate and keeps implementations clean... Even on Lite.
And that's where it started at in Qoder. It's up to 968 tests and pushing closer to 230k LOC now. Still keeping the instructions clean that I gave it at step 1. Which is strict Zero-Allocation and flat arrays. I added inbetween for it too, like adding Git and saying it should commit at stable states and keeping documentation up to date. It's been flawless at it.
Ok, update, I just hit usage cap on Lite. Apparently, they have a monthly cap on it. But what's interesting, is that Lite finished the entire set of tasks first, committed and pushed... Then only did it enforce the usage cap. Which means even when you eventually (for me it was probably 100k+ LOC across the 4 projects concurrently) hit the Lite cap, they dont leave you dead in the water, it finishes first, then stops. Which other platform finishes up before it hits cap?
Here's an idea of what it did when cap hit... Those requirements were set during the first prompt, a few days ago. It still enforces it and 20 of this round of edits were done after I had hit the Lite usage cap on another agent. Instead of stopping dead in it's tracks, it kept going, finishing not only the active edit, but all the edits and still pushed to git before it enforced the cap. And that's just what Qoder offers for free, to everyone... Even without any billing details or anything added beyond a generic 'sign in with google'. I am thoroughly impressed.
No way, you're just finding out too... Well, I guess it's because we have way too many tools like this over here ā hard to keep track.š¤£
Honestly, I'm loving it! I've been building V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y. IDE and it didnt just help me build out the entire agentic browser (from scratch), but using their system made me realize just how 'stupid' the go-to agentic IDEs are. Seriously, the fact they built in codebase analysis with patch generating and an entire Wikis generator. It made me expand the scope of velocity to include those. Cuz a wikis tied to a merkle root site-map as agent context means it's a VC system that tracks state, not just code. The codebase analysis, while they use AI to do most of the analysis, you can see they have a pretty solid setup for pattern detection that isnt inherent to a model. They did a really good job with it and it blows my mind the more I use it. For perspective, Lite mode, I've now pushed close to 100k LOC through it, that's 10s of millions of tokens... For free, on an unpaid account, without ever hitting 'high traffic' or 'fair-usage' blocks. It just works and it works well... Writing Rust isnt easy and it's doing a phenomenal job. It's faster and smarter than Gemini 3.6 flash, that's something I can confidently say.