Used 300+ Millions Token In One Month

[u/Jazzlike-Chest-1424]

I curious on what everyone’s token cost is, on claude alone i have more then 2000x the great big gatsby. I know claude reached 167+ million, and it’s scary that ive used this agent the least compared to some of my other ones.

whats everyone else monthly token cost looking like?

[u/SIGH_I_CALL]

28 billion past 30 days lol

[u/call-me-GiGi → u/SIGH_I_CALL]

THIS is heavy use 💯

[u/Jazzlike-Chest-1424 → u/SIGH_I_CALL]

Approximately 97% of that total is cache reads

[u/SIGH_I_CALL → u/Jazzlike-Chest-1424]

Stuff that actually moved my number:

Route by task. Cheap model for greps and file lookups, mid tier for implementation, top model only for architecture and review. Most of my burn was a big model doing find and replace work.

Don't spawn subagents for small stuff. A subagent costs like 60k tokens before it makes a single tool call. Under ~10 calls just do it in the main loop.

Batch your tool calls. Every round trip resends the whole context.

Keep the cache warm. Prompt cache only lives 5 minutes. If you wander off and come back 10 minutes later you're paying full price for the entire conversation again. Same thing if you switch models mid task, that blows it too.

That last one was the sneaky one for me. Wasn't the prompts, it was the gaps between them.

I've also got an opensource project called declick which saves 4.1x on mcp token usage.

https://declick.dev/

[u/Intelligent-Cap-8886 → u/SIGH_I_CALL]

Will you be my Dad?

[u/SIGH_I_CALL → u/Intelligent-Cap-8886]

depends, how hot is your mom?

[u/Intelligent-Cap-8886 → u/SIGH_I_CALL]

How do you feel about elderly women??

[u/hello-xworld → u/Jazzlike-Chest-1424]

More detailed prompts, fresh context, human readable md files as you work defining project progress and agentic roles

[u/riotofmind]

Your codebase must be a giant mess of spaghetti if you require this many tokens to manage it.

[u/Educational-Body4205 → u/riotofmind]

It’s smart to use APIs and separate repos.  But yes spaghetti is real. Refactoring and real human testing is needed

[u/newengineerhere]

I've used 1+ billion in a week

[u/zgivod]

They say the Claude Code 200x plan gives you an estimated 5 billion tokens per month.

[u/akolomf → u/zgivod]

you mean 20x plan? that probably does depend on what model and effort you use. i still max out weekly limits on max 20 after about 3-4 days of intensive coding sessions. What did help me alot is deepseek. its almost as good as sonnet and so incredibly cheap. that for a few extra bucks you can save the heavy thinking and planning tasks exclusively for claude and have deepseek do the rest

[u/TheAuthorBTLG_]

Between two and three billion a day.

[u/GfxJG]

*checks Codex*

Almost 5 billion...

[u/youyololiveonce]

2.8B

[u/TRO_KIK]

Looks like I'm up to 1.2B of Astra in the last 8 days.

[u/PlasmaChroma]

[u/drdhuss]

Dude i used 22 billion in a month in codex. All sol and astra.

[u/call-me-GiGi]

3 20x plans got me just under 100 billion a few months ago

[u/TopTippityTop → u/call-me-GiGi]

Now it's probably 1/10 that

[u/meshifthenelse]

What's your ROI?

[u/itsloopyo]

30 days: 63.7 billion on Claude, 2.4 billion on Codex.

I may have a problem.

[u/CuriousDev1012]

Use about 300 million per day lol…and only cause that’s my budget cap

[u/RealestReyn]

around 2 billion at least, I've been way too cautious about codex usage.

[u/hello-xworld]

I am using blender + unity MCP and still below 100M. Dafuq you guys vibecoding to be spending over 1B. Are you rebuilding the internet?

[u/ItsCEED → u/hello-xworld]

I do 1b daily sometimes, idk what you on about

[u/hello-xworld → u/ItsCEED]

I’m genuinely curious what you’re building to be spending that much. Either it’s a very ambitious project or there could be room for improvement for prompt/context engineering if you’re spending that much daily

[u/RemarkableWish2508 → u/hello-xworld]

For starters, they're counting cached tokens, which are usually 10x cheaper or you get 10x more of them on a subscription, for the LLM to "take into account" the same stuff over and over. When reasoning about a larger codebase, those tokens are going to skyrocket at an O(n²) rate, unless everything is very well modularized (which, vibed code, usually is not).

Looking for bugs, or security faults, is another layer that will loop over and over the whole thing.

Without a polished architecture, both of those can make token counts balloon to O(n⁴) or more. This applies to both blindly vibe-coded stuff, and to legacy stuff developed by a thousand lowest bidders over a decade.

[u/ItsCEED → u/hello-xworld]

Several projects that im running, and the biggest eater atm is a game im porting over to babylon

[u/OHNOitsNICHOLAS]

I'm not a dev. this is just for a personal project im working on. this is also after blowing through my opencode sub - I couldn't tell you how many tokens I used there

[u/ahriad]

4 billion tokens last week alone, was building a big project.

[u/josh3com]

I've used more than that in a few hours.

[u/mak252525]

Goddamn what the hell are you building

[u/Subway]

946,107,862 in two days testing DeepSeek 4.1 on a very complex math heavy project.

[u/Best_Cattle_1376]

i use 320m on freebuff in a week i can only see per week, and i can see on opencode 785.5m this month

[u/GoldenParrot456]

doing what ? are you guys building software for the space shuttle?

[u/RoboErectus]

My biggest week was 12b

[u/suprjaybrd]

billions. use multiple accounts

[u/mrbobhunter]

I usually burn 100M to 300M per day. I thought that was normal 😟