I think so, I think you’re getting downvoted because of how you’ve framed it. People don’t like it when you tell them that you think they’ve made a stupid purchase. :-P

I do think more expensive models are valuable in some cases. For example, I’ve noticed that Opus (even 4.7) is much better than DeepSeek V4 at noticing information with small amounts of representation in a large context history, you should pick Opus if you need to find needle(s) in a large haystack. I’ve never worked on a project with millions of lines of code, but I’m guessing it becomes relevant in those situations.

A big thing, too, is that it’s work to get a non-frontier coding stack setup. I’ve spent many hours of free time getting OpenCode to do what I want, but I enjoy it so it’s NBD. If you don’t like puttering around with your development tools, $100/mo for Claude Code really isn’t all that much and you can call it a day.