Claude Code Costs, Act II — Where the big hidden costs are

<p>A token allowance is usually treated as a spending budget, which is the wrong mental model for free tiers. The right model is a cache to be managed, because agent workloads

<p>AI coding assistants are useful. They're also expensive if you're not paying attention. I was spending $120/month before I started tracking. Now I spend under $50 for the same

<p> </p> <p><em>How billing actually works, the ecosystem of options to spend less, and the mistakes that quietly cost you money — grounded in measurement, not folklore.</em></p>

<p>Anthropic shipped Opus 4.7 on April 16, 2026. Same $5/$25 pricing as 4.6. Same 1M context. Same 128K output ceiling. Different model entirely when you put it in an agentic

<p>GPT-5.4 shipped on March 5. Seven weeks later, on April 23, 2026, OpenAI released GPT-5.5 — and the pace alone tells you something about where this race is headed. This isn't

<p>The price page hasn't moved. Five dollars per million input. Twenty-five per million output. Identical to Opus 4.6.</p> <p>Run the same Claude Code call on both, though, and

<h1> My Exit Rule Said '2 Periods' — My Code Was Counting Something Else Entirely </h1> <p>My funding-rate bot has an exit rule that reads like plain English:<br /> </p> <div

<p>You have 200,000 tokens to work with—but most people are still copy-pasting text like they're fighting a 4K limit that doesn't exist anymore.</p> <p>I watched a senior