Building the same library twice: open-weight model cost $19.86 vs Opus's $346.70
robeybeswick · reddit · 2026-10-21
A big-tech engineer built the same open-source library twice with opencode — once with DeepSeek V4-Flash ($19.86) and once with Opus 5.5 ($346.70), an 18x price gap. Opus produced better results with 40% fewer tokens, but the author argues cheap open-weight models in a solid harness are good enough for many tasks and the industry should take 'model rightsizing' seriously.
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