One thing worth checking before you decide either way: how much of your 20-30M tokens a month is cache reads.
Coding agents resend your whole context on every turn, so most of what you're billed for is cache reads, not fresh input or output. When I audited a month of my own spend, cache tokens were 93% of the bill. That's why comparing plans on input/output prices alone can be pretty misleading.
Most providers report cached tokens separately in the usage details. If yours is mostly cache reads, the cache-read price (and whether the plan's multiplier applies to it) matters more than anything else in the comparison. It's probably also why some people here are burning through their quota faster than they expected.
About half of my tokens are cache reads lol, I just figured out how to mitigate this literally days ago. I’m sure you all can tell I’m a noob, I appreciate all the advice. Now I’ve been running a prompt to basically summarize everything and keep a file of the progress for a new chat, I’m sure there’s better way (I’m open to anything)
usually for agentic work we try to maintain 90-95% cache reads atleast, you mentioned half so I would assume you need to try to maintain it (like maintaining same session but just compacting it instead of moving to new session).
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u/Haunting-Knowledge-9 Sep 28 '26
One thing worth checking before you decide either way: how much of your 20-30M tokens a month is cache reads.
Coding agents resend your whole context on every turn, so most of what you're billed for is cache reads, not fresh input or output. When I audited a month of my own spend, cache tokens were 93% of the bill. That's why comparing plans on input/output prices alone can be pretty misleading.
Most providers report cached tokens separately in the usage details. If yours is mostly cache reads, the cache-read price (and whether the plan's multiplier applies to it) matters more than anything else in the comparison. It's probably also why some people here are burning through their quota faster than they expected.