I just went through the agony of provisioning my team with new Claude Code 5x subs 2 weeks ago after reviewing all of the options available at that time. Since then, the major changes include a Cerebras sub for Qwen3 Coder 480B, and now GPT-5. I’m still not sure I made the right choice, but hey, I’m not married to it either.

If you plan on using this much at all then the primary thing to avoid is API-based pay per use. It’s prohibitively costly to use regularly. And even for less important changes it never feels appropriate to use a lower quality model when the product counts.

Claude Code won primarily because of the sub and that they have a top tier agentic harness and models that know how to use it. Opus and Sonnet are fantastic agents and very good at our use case, and were our preferred API-based models anyways. We can use Claude Code basically all day with at least Sonnet after using our Opus limits up. Worth nothing that Cline built a Claude Code provider that the derivatives aped which is great but I’ve found Claude Code to be as good or better anyways. The CLI interface is actually a bonus for ease of sharing state via copy/paste.

I’ll probably change over to Gemini Code Assist next, as it’s half the price and more context length, but I’m waiting for a better Gemini 2.5 Pro and the gemini-cli/Code Assist extensions to have first party planning support, which you can get some form of third party through custom extensions with the cli, but as an agent harness they are incomplete without.

The Cerebras + Qwen3 Coder 480B with qwen3-cli is seriously tempting. Crazy generation speed. Theres some question about how long big the rate limit really is but it’s half the cost of Claude Code 5x. I haven’t checked but I know qwen3-cli, which was introduced along side the model, is a fork of gemini-cli with Qwen-focused updates; wonder if they landed a planning tool?

I don’t really consider Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Roo, Kilo et al as they can’t provide a flat rate service with the kind of rate limits you can get with the aforementioned.

GitHub Copilot could be a great offering if they were willing to really compete with a good unlimited premium plan but so far their best offering has less premium requests than I make in a week, possibly even in a few days.

Would love to hear if I missed anything, or somehow missed some dynamic here worth considering. But as far as I can tell, given heavy use, you only have 3 options today: Claude Max, Gemini Code Assist, Cerebras Code.

If the primary use case is input heavy, which is true of agentic tools, there’s a world where partial GPU offload with many channels of DDR5 system RAM leads to an overall better experience. A good GPU will process input many times faster, and with good RAM you might end up with decent output speed still. Seems like that would come in close to $12k?

And there would be no competition for models that do fit entirely inside that VRAM, for example Qwen3 32B.

Grok 3 mini is quite a decent agentic model and competitive with frontier models at a fraction of the cost; see livebench.ai.