You can use your GH subscription with a different harness. I'm using opencode with it, it turns GH into a pure token provider. The orchestration (compacting, etc.) is left to the harness.
It turns it into a very good value for money, as far as I'm concerned.
But you still get charged per turn right ? I don't like that because it impacts my workflow. When I was last using it I would easily burn through the 10$ plan in two days just by iterating on plans interactively.
Honestly I'm not sure, I'm on my company's plan, I get a progress bar vaguely filling, but no idea of the costs or billing under the hood.
But you still get the reduced context-window.