To answer the last question: What kind of programming do you do? You are not going to be able to run a model competitive with the SOTA yet; use the cloud. Since you have the budget I'd suggest getting a $20 subscription of each (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) so you can lean on their respective strengths.
I got a free month of the Premium tier with Google[1], YMMV. Been pleasantly surprised about Gemini 3 Pro. Got ChatGPT Business at work to compare it to.
That said, Google's VSCode integration was terrible, kept logging me out and just didn't work well.
I used the $200/mo OpenAI subscription for a while, but cancelled when Gemini 3 came out. It was useful for the deep research credits until the Web search gpt got sufficiently good on it's own
Is anyone here actually using the 200$ a month subscriptions with chat gpt or the google 150$ per month ?
Is it worth it for more code generation ? Or spend my money on a couple gpus and go local