# Hy4 preview

11 Hacker News commenters recommended Hy4 preview and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 2 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend Hy4 preview as a cheap model on the intelligence-price frontier, with strong reasoning traces for its price. Critics say it trails DeepSeek and is often unusable due to rate limits and timeouts.

## Why people recommend it

- Cheap for its quality (3 comments): "I believe it's on the intelligence/price pareto frontier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477304)) "it's relatively cheap with a 5% cache cost" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49492750)) "Hy3 is so cheap. So this is great." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477168))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Claude Opus](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-opus.md): 3331 recommend
- [OpenAI GPT](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpt-5-5.md): 1205 recommend
- [Claude Sonnet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/claude-sonnet.md): 854 recommend
- [DeepSeek V4 Flash](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-v4-flash.md): 828 recommend
- [Fable](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fable.md): 823 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Hy4 preview", https://hackerapproved.com/p/hy4-preview/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).