Had a Gemini Pro sub for 1 or 2 months but it didn't impress me that much.
When I need real horsepower (usually advanced math stuff) I use DeepSeek, which is both free and unparalleled in my opinion.
I did some experiments with OpenRouter but my total usage is still below $10.
More and more I've been experimenting with local thinking models and while it's quite slow (on my non-Apple, CPU-heavy hardware, at least), for some use cases it's an acceptable trade-off and the results have been satisfactory.
I care a lot about data privacy and I'm just not gonna upload clients' proprietary codebases under NDA to some AI company. I've been considering buying or renting proper hardware for local inference but the TCO (particularly with regards to depreciation) is not intuitive.