What if you do not want to use AI SaaS products for any reason (monetary - subscriptions add up quick, privacy - do not want share your data with companies, etc.,)?
One approach is to use local-llm on your laptop, or pc. You might also be ok with doing so on a cloud hosted instance where you get to control the entire stack.
Another approach is to use some of the “free tier” as seen here — How I Code with AI on a budget/free; via HN.
Every month so many new models come out. My new fav is GLM-4.5… Kimi K2 is also good, and Qwen3-Coder 480b, or 2507 instruct.. very good as well. All of those work really well in any agentic environment/in agent tool