How to Pick the Best LLM for Programming Cost vs Capability in 2025
In 2025, dozens of language models can now write, debug, or refactor code. But which ones are actually good — and which give the best value for money? Let's try to make a quick recap for your future programming session. Disclaimer: this is a moving market and each day can see tremendous changes so this is a picture in time and a methodology example for your own review 🧱 How We Calculate Token Costs The 80 / 20 blended formula Most IDE copilots send a large prompt (project context, previous messages, code files) and receive a short answer (patch, explanation). Field logs from Cline, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Sourcegraph Cody show that roughly 80 % of tokens are input and 20 % are output . To give a single price you can reason about, we compute: Blended Cost ($/M) = 0.80 × Price_in + 0.20 × Price_out Example : Claude 4 Opus costs $15 /M input and $75 /M output → 0.80×15 + 0.20×...