Chinese models burned my OpenRouter credits faster than Claude burns my Max quota — what am I doing wrong?
My setup: Claude Max ($200/mo), with Fable as the master orchestrator on top of my own custom made harness. Fable plans, then summons Opus for judgment work and Sonnet for grunt work. Works great, but I'm hitting my weekly limits and needed an expansion.
So I swapped Opus and Sonnet for GLM and DeepSeek through OpenRouter as the overflow lane. Put $10 in as a trial. Real example: a task to investigate why my clients weren't getting their credentials after signup, fix it, and backfill the missing emails — cost $2 on GLM/DeepSeek. The same job on Claude barely dents my daily quota. At this burn rate the "cheap" lane costs about the same as a second Max subscription.
I know part of the answer: Max gives you way more API-equivalent compute than the $50/week sticker, so comparing raw OpenRouter spend against subscription quota isn't fair. And I've read that OpenRouter's proxy breaks prompt caching for DeepSeek, so agentic loops re-pay full input price every step. I even had Fable pick the cheapest providers with caching enabled — still burned.
So for the people actually saving money with Chinese models:
- Are you all going direct (DeepSeek API with their cache + off-peak, GLM Coding Plan) instead of OpenRouter?
- Is there any setup where metered pay-per-token genuinely beats just buying a second Max for orchestrator + worker workflows?
- Or is the real answer that these models are only cheap on their own subscriptions, same trick as Claude?
Genuinely asking, not hating. I want them in my stack but the math isn't mathing.