How I Use all the Top-Tier AI Models Without Spending a Cent

I use AI heavily for coding. Editors or IDE with AI being integrated usually provide an Agent mode. It is the "I do whatever I think is necessary with your code base"-mode. The AI creates, modifies, deletes files and directories and executes commands on the command line. It literally works as if a human programmer would be coding for me.

When I use AI to crank out code in big amounts–and also use the best models that exist at that time–then the bill starts to get expensive quickly. In 4 days I consume my €20 budget which normally would last 1 month. Huuu, not cheap! Wouldn't it be cool if I could use the best models at a fraction or at no cost at all. Sounds too good to be true!

By accident I stumbled across an article about prompting and a list of sites which provide a generous free-tier of the best models. Here's the list I curated and I sorted it from often to hardly used:

There's a catch though: I pay it with little convenience compared to using the AIs in the IDE. I need to jump around between tabs, include code from files in the prompts myself. For composing prompts I use this tool. I select the files I want to include, write what I want AI to do and it will put the content of all files plus my instruction into the clipboard. Then I copy it into the chat window of one these AI services mentioned above. The prompt looks similar to this:

### START OF FILE css/style.css ###
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Inter:ital,opsz,wght@0,14..32,100..900;1,14..32,100..900&display=swap');
@import "tailwindcss";

@theme {
    --default-font-family: 'Inter', var(--font-sans);
}

@layer components {
    .btn-secondary {
        @apply px-6 py-3;
    }
}
### END OF FILE css/style.css ###

Add a red primary-action button style!

It's not more complicated than that. I started to develop an intuition for which model works well for a certain type of task.

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