Free tier Gemini is good enough for my personal projects and hopefully a local model can replace it before i ever personally pay for a single token from anyone.
local models are getting pretty close. they still require some serious hardware to run at a reasonable rate but they're about smart enough to be useful.
Yeah i just don't have the hardware to run them at a reasonable rate and am not ready to invest that much at today's prices. My tinkering with DeepSeek last year was promising but the minutes-per-response made it unusable.
Work can pay a Claude sub. At home i see no need