People work on different things, fail to mention their field of usage in the comments, and then misunderstand the experiences of others who do the same. Repeat ad nauseam.
The $5 is so they can see if open weights models are worth using, not so they can use it for a month. (Which you can't; The quota runs out way sooner than a month for any serious usage. Still worth the price of entry.)
4.7 Flash is a small model that's almost a year old, which is ancient. And yes, your dinky GPU will not run anything worthwhile.
Just spend $5 on OpenCode Go and give GLM 5.2 a shot if you have the time. It's not quite as good as Opus, but it's more than good enough for many tasks.
You using models released this year? I hear this complaint a lot, and it's often due to using an old model which is not as good at tool calling as newer models.
We must be in different communities... Qwen models are the most recommended ones that will actually run on local hardware that is accessible to the masses!
OpenCode Go is a smoking deal IMO. You basically get 6x multiplier on the $10 price since you get $60 worth of usage for $10. And the first month is only $5 so it's even better.
It goes pretty quick, but it's still a great deal. Highly recommended.