So I do freelance copywriting, and the past few months have been brutal with how fast the big AI tools keep raising their prices. I was spending way too much on subscriptions, so I started experimenting with some lesser-known models that don't get talked about much. Not gonna lie, the first week was a disaster. My prompts weren't optimized for these tools and I was getting garbage outputs. But once I figured out a proper workflow, things actually started clicking. Last week alone I cranked out 8 full blog outlines that my clients approved. Made about $1,878 last month, which is honestly better than when I was using the premium stuff. On paper this felt like I was downgrading, but in practice my output went up. Here's basically how I structure my prompts now: I give it clear context upfront, who's the target audience, what tone I need, examples from competitors. I assign it a specific role like "you're an experienced content editor" or whatever fits. Then I add hard constraints, word count, how many sources to reference, exact format. I'll include one good example paragraph and one bad one so it knows what to avoid. After that I iterate in focused rounds, one thing at a time. First pass is headlines, second is argument structure, third is source validation, etc. What's been working for me on the budget side: Text generation: Been using GLM-4.6 through Zai, it's honestly worth like 10x what I'm paying for the plan Images: Playground v2.5 is pretty solid for quick stuff. SDXL still holds up. Flux.1 is decent for testing different styles fast Video: Pika and Runway Gen-3 are perfect for short social media clips. Luma Dream Machine works fine if I just need to test a concept Why I'm sticking with this setup: First of all, it is way better cost-to-value ratio when I'm doing long sessions, and I'm not constantly stressed about hitting rate limits or sitting in queues. Secondly, with clean prompts and a good process, the output gets surprisingly close to GPT-4 or Claude. The thing I keep wondering is this. Are we all just overpaying for brand names, or do the expensive models actually have some edge that I'm missing? Like, if you put in the work on prompt engineering and workflow, can the underdogs actually match the big players for most practical use cases? Would love to hear how others are handling this. Edit: Of course, I can't let AI tools replace my own work, the client is paying me, and from my perspective, my own skills are the priority. I only use them for support with things like grammar, sentence flow, and tone adjustment. Basically, just as a helpful tool, that's it.   submitted by   /u/Scared-Biscotti2287 [link]   [comments]