Not asking to make a war. I'm happy with Sonnet but looking for cost effective alternative as my bills reach $100+/month.

Please be specific with model versions when suggesting alternatives (saying just "GPT" isn't helpful).

The alternative doesn't necessarily need to be better than Sonnet, but at least comparable in performance.

I haven't tried R1 and curious about it but I see people putting 670 bilion and 70 or even 7 bilion into same bucket and it's hard for me to believe these distilled versions are reliable. And I mean complex reasoning and codding here with large context windows - not writing a stupid snake game with a 0 shot prompt! It's like many people recommend haiku to save money on sonnet. It's so terribly worse than sonnet that I don't consider it worthy for anything else than calling some simple tools as a subagent.

Also I understand that there is no function calling (tool use) on R1, so it's not very useful. If it's is then which API offers 670 bilion version? Because sign ups to deep seek are blocked... So, I don't know if I'm missing something here but I don't see better options than Sonnet so far...

Just tested o3 mini yesterday. It's rubbish...

I was so excited when I used the free version of Sonnet 3.5 for coding that I instantly bought credits for the API. But now I feel like the Web version with the System Instructions is way smarter at coding than the API with some manual instruction. Anyone else share that opinion?

I highly recommend using Claude 3.5 Sonnet through the API - you won't have rate limits, and with its cheaper cost you'll likely be spending less than a subscription to Claude Pro!

There's lots of open source web platforms that let you use your own API Key to do this. Albeit you won't get to use the artifacts feature.

I have a free native iOS app that supports chatting to Claude 3.5 Sonnet (and all other LLMs) using your own API Key which you could use: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pal-chat-ai-chat-client/id6447545085?platform=iphone

Claude removed free access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the website. If you'd still like to use it without having to pay a flat $20/month, I highly recommend using Claude 3.5 Sonnet through the API - you won't have rate limits, and with its cheaper cost you'll likely be spending less than a subscription to Claude Pro!

I have a free native iOS app that supports chatting to Claude 3.5 Sonnet (and all other LLMs) using your own API Key which you could use: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pal-chat-ai-chat-client/id6447545085?platform=iphone

On one hand, Opus 4 is crazy exciting. However, in API it costs about five times as much as Sonnet. I see some reports coming in that people are hitting rate limits much faster in Claude Code using Opus, which makes sense.

It looks like you can change the model that Claude Code uses. Maybe that will help preserve your limits if you do not need all that extra firepower?

Here is a link from the Anthropic website, and also Sonnet 4's How To when I asked.

https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code/bedrock-vertex-proxies

'''

For Regular Windows Users (Using Anthropic's API)

The Bedrock references are for enterprise users who want to use Amazon's cloud service instead of Anthropic's API directly. You can ignore those - here's what you need for regular Windows usage:

Option 1: Environment Variables (Windows)

Command Prompt:

set ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-4-20250514
set ANTHROPIC_SMALL_FAST_MODEL=claude-3-5-haiku-20241022
claude

PowerShell:

$env:ANTHROPIC_MODEL="claude-sonnet-4-20250514"
$env:ANTHROPIC_SMALL_FAST_MODEL="claude-3-5-haiku-20241022"
claude

Option 2: Persistent Configuration (Recommended)

This is probably easier for Windows users:

claude config set -g ANTHROPIC_MODEL claude-sonnet-4-20250514
claude config set -g ANTHROPIC_SMALL_FAST_MODEL claude-3-5-haiku-20241022

This saves the configuration permanently so you don't need to set environment variables each time.

Option 3: Windows Environment Variables (System-wide)

If you want this to be permanent across all command prompt sessions:

1. Press Win + R, type sysdm.cpl, press Enter

2. Click "Environment Variables"

3. Under "User variables" click "New"

4. Variable name: ANTHROPIC_MODEL

5. Variable value: claude-sonnet-4-20250514

6. Repeat for ANTHROPIC_SMALL_FAST_MODEL with value claude-3-5-haiku-20241022 '''

There are so many options and I dont know which to choose. There is Cursor, Poe, Perplexity Pro, Anthropic API, Claude Webchat etc etc.

The Webchat is great but the usage limits are too annoying. I would like to more often use a bigger context size because then Sonnet seems to compare much better.

Right now I am thinking about using Poe with the Sonnet 3.5 200k Bot. 1k credits for one message and you'll get 1million credits per month for 20$. so I guess that would be quite cheap compared to the API.

Cursor also looks interesting though with their unlimited slow usage, but not sure if you also can get Sonnet 3.5 slow usage or not.

What do you guys use for programming?

Hello everyone, given Claude 4 sonnet launched today, how does it compare to 3.5 sonnet?