I've found that using Claude (in Terminal.app) with DeepSeek at the back-end is much the same (I'd say about 95% of Real-Claude's ability), and it's a
lot cheaper. I can burn through the 20x weekly limit pretty much every week (and not have credit for the weekend) so that's costing me £200/month. DeepSeek is averaging at about £1/day.
I just bumped my Claude account down from the £200/month option to £18/month. I use Real-Claude to validate the decisions of DeepSeek, which seems to not get quite as much of the fine details as Real-Claude does. Once they're pointed out though, DeepSeek is fine, and off to the races.
