A developer at braw.dev laid out a clear case for dumping Anthropic's $100/month Claude Code subscription in favor of Zed editor ($10/month) plus OpenRouter API credits ($90/month). The math works because OpenRouter credits roll over for 365 days instead of vanishing at month's end. If you're not coding every single day, that's real money saved.
The setup is straightforward. Zed coordinates LLM interactions, tool definitions, and workflows through what the author describes as an 'agent' system. Through OpenRouter, you get Claude, Gemini, Qwen, and dozens of other models with a single API key. You can even keep using Claude Code by pointing it at OpenRouter's endpoints instead of Anthropic's directly, though it's built for Anthropic models and may not play perfectly with others.
Privacy matters here. OpenRouter offers 'Zero Data Retention' mode, which restricts which models you can access but stops your code from being stored. Models like qwen/qwen3.6-plus, hosted on Alibaba Cloud, become unavailable. That's a fair trade if you're working with proprietary code. Hacker News commenters backed the approach, with several noting GitHub's $40 plan also offers good value for GPT-5 and Claude variants if you want something between full API freedom and subscription lock-in.