Let's wait for independent benchmarks at least

the benchmarks provided are already from independent organizations:

Terminal-Bench 4.0 - Stanford & Laude Institute (with funding from all of the AI companies)

FrontierCode v1.1 - Cognition

CursorBench - Cursor (now SolarBoringSpaceXAI I believe)

GDPVal-AA - Artificial Analysis

AutomationBench - Zapier

Humanity's Last Exam - CAIS and Scale AI

Terminal-Bench-Science - Stanford, Laude, Ai2, Allen Institute

OSWOrld - XLANG Lab @ the University of Hong Kong

Chartography - Surge AI

Input $4/MTok and output $20/MTok is a welcome surprise. Cheaper than Opus 5/4.8, Astra 6, Fable 5.

The biggest one is the Cache reads going from $0.50 to $0.20 ... Read/Writes dropping by 25% but Cache reads by 60% has a much bigger impact.

Pi [1] is amazing. Since using it I've felt no need to switch harnesses anymore.

Or choose Oh My PI [2] for batteries included

[1] https://github.com/earendil-works/pi [2] https://github.com/can1357/oh-my-pi

Can you use Pi with a Google Pro AI sub or do you need to use API billing?

Using API billing would be a bummer because, as far as I know, there's no way to set up a spend cap or pre-pay the API key, correct?

They finally allowed for a hard spend cap that's easy to set a few weeks ago: https://aistudio.google.com/spend

If you're happy with API billing then just use OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3.8-flash

Makes it easy to switch between models and I like it for exactly the reason that you're saying - I prepay and so can't accidentally spend my food budget.

Aside from the other reply, pi makes it _really easy_ to build your own usage tracking and limit machinery.

I would normally advise against such efforts for a variety of reasons (such as inaccurate tracking, etc), but specifically under pi, this mechanism has been extremely well behaved and accurate for me.

It is trivial to set up a spending cap on Google Cloud and also on Google AI Studio.

That said, it is probably easier to use APIs from FireWorks.ai, Ollama Cloud, Open Router, etc.