Best Models with Hermes after testing with 6 billion tokens
I considered cost effectiveness as my main motive here. I tried various tasks (Web scraping, advanced research analytics, Software development, LLM inference enhancments, etc ) and the best were as following
1-GPT 5.5 (by far)
2-Kimi k2.6
3-GLM 5.1
4-Minimax M2.7
5-Qwen 3.6 Max
6- Any Gemini model
(For local models, Qwen 3.6 35B A3B is the top option. Qwen 3.6 27B dense is good but too slow for my workflow.)
GPT 5.5 is a real advancement over 5.4. It is the most expensive but having to wait 18 hours for a statisical research analysis with GLM 5.1 while GPT took less than an hour, that's a clear choice. I am not wasating 18 hours just to save 10$
I have tried Sonnet 4.6. It is awesome but cost is really high so i excluded it.
The subiscriptions that I find best (cost effectiveness as my main motive, again)
1-OpenAI 20$
2-Opencode Go 10$
3-Minimax 10$
4-Kimi's 20$ plan
5-GLM 18$ (if you have olde 3$ annual plan, it would go 2nd place)
Chinese models are awesome. GLM kept getting stuck in loops all the time. Kimi will start getting good then the 5-hour quota kicks in. Minimax is... fine? It needs excellent prompting to work as desired. GPT 5.5 was the beast in software development, scraping, analysis and multi-steps cron jobs.