Claude Code Costs, Act I — How the billing actually works

<h2> Cursor and Windsurf are not AI coding tools. They're slot machines wrapped in a dark theme. Both exploits Claude Opus 4.7's broken tokenizer—which silently inflates your

<p> </p> <p>A single-model session that stays well-cached is cheap. The biggest swing in a multi-model bill comes from one move — <strong>switching models</strong> — because the

Prompt caching in Amazon Bedrock can cut input token costs by up to 90% when you repeatedly send the same context to foundation models. This post walks through six practical

<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

<p>This post from Anthropic is causing a lot of angst among its most ardent users. While it is disguised as a credit, it really is them tightening API token limits (aka charging

<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>There is a whole open-source ecosystem aimed at cutting LLM cost. The trick to evaluating any of it is to ask <strong>which of the three cost lines it attacks</strong> — cached