Self-Hosting AI Models After Claude's Usage Limits
TL;DR: Claude Code is still king, Qwen 3 Coder + opencode is a strong contender tho. Have high hopes for Gemini cli and Crush.
I’m definitely part of the 1% that has got a ton of benefit out of their payment model, and I’m not entirely surprised that they’re changing the deal, given the incredible demand for Claude Code. Much like Cursor’s recent pricing changes, this caused a lot of anger in the community, and it also triggered my curiosity on what other options are out there.
Just to set the record straight tho: While I often worked 16h-days, I never automated Claude Code and was well within their Terms of Service. My Anthropic bill for July is at ~6000$, since I’ve been using their GitHub Review bot, and while some people have been extracting the Max API Token to run on GitHub in the background, I opted to not break the rules and pay up… so Anthropic, we cool?
So what are the alternatives? I spend some time testing every promising tool I could find. Claude Code is insofar hard to replace, as it’s this genius blend of amazing model & tooling. But the landscape is changing fast! There’s quite a few contenders out there that are worth a look:
