The only thing I’d add is that it’s not really fair to compare “expensive” and “cheap” models directly. We’ve got to keep something like a hedonistic index in mind: paid GPT-5 and Sonnet 4.5 can handle certain tasks that free GPT-5-mini and Grok Code Fast will never manage — or they’ll manage, but way worse.
Right now I’ve pretty much switched entirely to GPT-5-high, mainly because it’s really smart and not that pricey. But there are some super simple tasks that are perfectly safe to run through GCF. And then there are some that actually need Sonnet 4.5 (or Haiku 4.5).