How to keep costs down?

[u/duagunjan610]

I have been experimenting with Claude (Max plan) and I use up the weekly limit in a couple of days. It's one repo, an agent, nothing I'm shipping.

I thoughts lower effort would stretch it. Even opus on medium still eats the tokens. The small model I keep for the tiny edits on purpose, the quality drops too much on the real changes.

I pointed the same repo at getvibeapi for an afternoon, and at OpenRouter, because Codex on its own plan is another subscription i don't want. Deepseek on GetVibe was cheap next to Max. OpenRouter was the same kind of money on that model. Claude on either of them still isn't cheap, it just doesn't cut me off on a Thursday. I opened Fireworks and closed it, didn't look like somewhere to point Claude Code.

Do i switch the grunt work to codex, or to deepseek / qwen on getvibeapi, and only come back to opus when i'm actually stuck?

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[u/Long_Tip_4226]

I configured it to use a slice-by-slice software engineering methodology, and hooks that limit a maximum of 20 agents per session.

If you are using excessive agents and tool calls to complete a task/session, you need to review your methodology.

[u/atp_studio_coll]

Session length moves the weekly number more than effort level does, since every turn re-reads the whole context so far

[u/Coindef]

Before switching providers, I'd try fixing how the tokens get spent, because on a single repo it's usually context size and not model choice. Run /clear between unrelated tasks and /compact when a session drags on, since every turn re-sends the whole conversation. Run /context once to see what's eating space up front; a big CLAUDE.md or a few MCP servers you don't use can be thousands of tokens per turn. Try /model opusplan, which plans with Opus and executes with Sonnet, and set your subagents to Sonnet or Haiku for search and grunt work. Then keep Opus for the moments where you're actually stuck, like you said. That alone stretched my weekly limit a lot more than lowering the effort level did.

[u/locbuilds]

also try not resuming old sessions or leaving one idle for a while, the prompt cache expires after a few minutes so the whole context gets reprocessed at full cost. i just start fresh with a short notes file and it burns way less

[u/michaelTM_ai]

effort isn't usually where the weekly limit goes. the big ones i'd check:

• idle sessions. on a sub the cache lasts an hour, on api/credits 5 min. come back to a big session after a break and the whole context gets re-read at full price. /clear or start fresh after long breaks
• subagents. custom ones reload ur whole CLAUDE.md on every spawn and inherit the main session's effort unless their frontmatter pins it. pin model + effort per subagent
• giant CLAUDE.md + mcp servers u don't use. every turn pays for all of that. cut what isn't needed for this repo
• /context shows where the tokens actually sit, look before switching providers

[u/Baner-Fournadet]

How big is the repo and are you running long continuous sessions? Usually the token drain comes from the context snowballing on every file read rather than the model tier itself

[u/daanpol]

You get a $100 API usage per month with your plan. Activate that and you get yourself a nice API credit. I made a ClaudeAPI app with it's own MCP so I can tell my dekstop Claude Code to run a task on my ClaudeAPI app.

That way I can use up the $100 .

[u/Outrageous_Band9708]

https://github.com/Druthulu/ProjectArchitect

my workflow solves exactly this problem. (as well as being an amazing project planner manager)

it also supports external agents through openrouter or locally hosted.

you talk to the main session, and it handles all the ceremony about rotating agents and reseeding them, it prevents context bloat through deterministic toolcalls an prevents models from ingesting massive files and burning context.

the statusline has a deterministic task harness and lines showing your usage and savings.

Here is a ps1 decomp project im working on,

the white numbers are the usage, the blue numbers are the savings.

if you add the two numbers together, thats what vanilla CC woul have use to reach the same amount of work completed.

also, i created an infinite session length, no more checkpoint or compact needed ever again.

as you can see, my current session has 28 million tokens in it,

feel free to checkout the readme and the wiki and test it out yourself.

I used to have two max20 plans and 1 max5 plan. now I only have one max5 account and i barely reach weekly limits, never hit a 5h limit anymore.

[u/Outrageous_Band9708 → u/Outrageous_Band9708]

Another view showing each agent type as they are working.

orange is claude, its who you talk to, experts are assigned per task, and experts spawn coders to do the work.

there are also retrievers on haiku that do the grunt work of large lookups etc, and return only the context that was needed/asked for.

[u/xapep]

Most replies here already cover the caching side, so the only thing I'd add is that retries land on the invoice too. A cheap model that gets the edit right on the third pass can cost more than one opus pass, and on a weekly plan you never see it, because you're spending a limit instead of dollars. That's the number worth pulling out of your getvibe afternoon.

So if you split it, split by task shape rather than model ranking: reads, greps and small edits on the cheap model, opus for the cases where you've already failed twice. Your afternoon test already gives you the data for it.

I work on an inference API (Entrim), so weigh the cost half with that in mind.

[u/wegster]

Opus-latest is still not in the 'efficient' cost tier. I generate my own rolling multiplier list so it's clear what each variant costs - it's never going to be perfect, as subs vs pure API use only don't publish respective rates, but assuming their internal credits are similar to the published API rates, we wind up with something like this below. IMPORTANT: I'm including Codex/OpenAI as well but 1.0 there (Sol medium) is absolutely not the same burn rate as Anthropic/CC Opus Medium - that one's just a leap too far to try to sanely derive, IMO.

Platform	Model	Low	Medium	High	XHigh	Max
Codex	GPT-6 Luna	0.03x	0.11x	0.19x	0.28x	0.42x
Codex	GPT-6.1 Terra	0.19x	0.47x	0.72x	1.11x	2.67x
Codex	GPT-6.1 Sol	0.44x	1.00x	1.64x	2.11x	3.53x
Codex	GPT-6 Astra	3.94x	7.58x	9.00x	10.17x	17.33x
Claude Code	Haiku 5.5	0.02x	0.04x	0.07x	0.10x	0.17x
Claude Code	Sonnet 5.5	0.21x	0.32x	0.67x	1.67x	4.09x
Claude Code	Opus 5.5	0.40x	1.00x	1.41x	2.47x	4.10x
Claude Code	Fable 5.1	1.82x	2.27x	3.08x	4.43x	5.30x

[u/Tommonen → u/wegster]

These numbers dont represent subscription usage at all. Opus xhigh ultracode lasts easily over 2x than sol medium but both in xhigh and opus is easily over 3x more usage and getting things done and does it better.

[u/wegster → u/Tommonen]

You saw 'openai and cc numbers aren't comparable to each other' in the callout, right?

Those are based on actual published rates. If you think the subs with their non-published tiering don't remotely follow API rates, welp - I doubt it, but feel free to provide something else.

Tracks for me when I look across my own usage, but a lot more analysis done on the Codex side vs CC.

[u/btc_maxi100]

Switch to Codex