Get the Claude Code Cheap-Stack Scorecard

The companion to the video that fact-checked the entire "stop paying Anthropic $200/mo for Claude Code" genre — 42 near-identical videos, most already wrong (the price changed, the model got renamed, or the free tier is dead). This free one-pager is the honest scorecard: every realistic way to run Claude Code in 2026, each graded A–F on cost, quality, reliability and ease, with the one catch each video skips and who it's actually for. THE ONE MECHANIC: Claude Code is provider-agnostic — two env vars (ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL + ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN) point it at any model; and because it's a tool-calling loop, what breaks cheap setups isn't IQ, it's tool reliability. THE TIERS: (1) Official — Pro $20, Max 5x $100, Max 20x $200, and pay-as-you-go API (Opus $5/$25, Sonnet $3/$15 per 1M; ~$13/dev/day until one big run blows past $200). (2) Cheap cloud routing — GLM-5.2/Z.ai (~$18, ≈Sonnet-4), MiniMax M3 (~$10, near Opus-4.6, best price/perf), DeepSeek V4 (1M context, weaker tools), Kimi K2.7 (cheap but slow), Qwen3-Coder (context-tiered bill) — all China-based, so never route client or regulated code. (3) Routers & local — claude-code-router (free, fiddly), the LiteLLM malware warning (versions 1.82.7/1.82.8 were flagged — pin a clean one), and the honest truth that '100% local matches Claude' is really ~70%, needs 32GB+ RAM, and the popular tutorial model qwen2.5-coder actually fails inside Claude Code. (4) Do this instead — Codex CLI (free on the ChatGPT $20 you may already pay for), GitHub Copilot CLI ($10), opencode (free, BYO model) — plus the graveyard: the Gemini CLI and Qwen Code free tiers are both dead. THE VERDICTS: cheapest reliable full agent = Codex CLI; cheapest 'keep Claude Code' = GLM/MiniMax; the non-obvious winner = cheap PAID routing (~10c/1M, not the free tier that trains on your code); most overhyped = free-local-matches-Claude; and the ToS truth nobody says — routing a third-party model with your own key is SAFE (the 2026 bans were for tools that STOLE login tokens). Plus a copy-paste 3-step setup to run any model inside Claude Code. All prices and benchmarks are reported as of June 2026 — verify before you rely on them.

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