georgelarson.me
AI
model evaluation
SHOW HN2026
georgelarson.me
I tested 15 free AI models at building real software on a $25/year VPS
georgelarson.me#free ai models#ai coding benchmark#vps agent testing#opencode#openrouter
How HN took it
0 positive, 5 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 0 critical, out of 5 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
Objections
Cost of the VPS is questioned as cheaper than typical providers
From 1 comment
What VPS is $25/year? DigitalOcean seems to be about 3x that price for the low end droplets…
BobbyTables2 on HN
Missing quantization and model size details
From 2 comments
Also no mention of quants and not even sizes in many cases. I wish someone did this kind of comparison well.
a96 on HNOpencode doesn't publish what quantization they offer.
polski-g on HN
Unclear why a VPS was used instead of a local VM
From 1 comment
> Instead of fixing the rate limiter that was blocking its own tests, it patched the environment detection. That's enterprise development in a nutshell. That part made me laugh…
scorpioxy on HN
Requests
Comparison against paid state-of-the-art models
From 1 comment
Curious how the top performers compare to SOTA paid models. Also interested in understanding performance differences between running model on VPS hardware compared to a laptop.…
walkersutton on HN
Performance comparison between VPS and laptop
From 1 comment
Curious how the top performers compare to SOTA paid models. Also interested in understanding performance differences between running model on VPS hardware compared to a laptop.…
walkersutton on HN
Questions
Where were the models running
From 2 comments
I’m a little confused. So you got a VPS… was that just to host the result? Surely you weren’t running the models on it? What were the models running on? It doesn’t matter a ton…
bentt on HNI don't believe the models were running on the VPS itself. According to my understanding of the article, they used OpenRouter and OpenCode's service as service providers. The…
scorpioxy on HN
Why use a VPS rather than a local VM
From 1 comment
> Instead of fixing the rate limiter that was blocking its own tests, it patched the environment detection. That's enterprise development in a nutshell. That part made me laugh…
scorpioxy on HN