On Claude Pro, Kagi Assistant and Charm Hyper

On Claude Pro, Kagi Assistant and Charm Hyper

18th Jul 2026

328 words, 2 minutes.

I’ve cancelled my Claude Pro subscription. It wasn’t out of any dissatisfaction<br>with Claude; on the contrary, I still think it’s the leading LLM for general<br>use and especially for coding.

No, my choice was more because I realised I was wasting money.

I already pay for Kagi, and even upgraded to their Duo plan so I could<br>give my wife a search engine that works for her (versus the other way around).<br>As part of that subscription, I can use Kagi Assistant.

For general-purpose ‘consolidated search’ — answers — I ran tests of asking<br>Claude and Kagi the same question, and more often than not they came out very<br>similar, if not the same.

I don’t do a lot of programming, but I probably end up running Claude Code once<br>a week to do something far faster than my rusty tech chops can muster. All of<br>my server machines run FreeBSD, which Claude Code recently ended support for<br>when they moved to shipping their own package versus distribution via npm.

I’ve been a fan of Charm’s mods for some time, which led me to their CLI coding<br>tool, Crush. Now Charm have extended Crush with a subscription inference<br>service called Hyper.

Crush itself, being a Go-based binary, is considerably snappier to use than CC<br>anyway, plus it’s entirely LLM-agnostic, simply needing API tokens. With Hyper,<br>one can now also access some very-keenly priced LLMs that are often almost as<br>good as Anthropic’s models. Although Hyper doesn’t yet support Kimi K3,<br>released this week and looking like a serious competitor to the leading<br>frontier models, you can bet it will soon (Charm are moving quickly with Crush<br>and Hyper).

So I’m returning to buffering up some Anthropic tokens for when I really want<br>to use Claude, either in Crush or for chat in TypingMind. Otherwise, Kagi<br>Assistant works really well.

Not in the slightest bit important, but as an aide, Kagi&rsquo;s logo doesn&rsquo;t also<br>look like a butthole.

✍️

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