Insights
Practical guides on AI coding agents, LLM costs, websites and custom software: what we built, what it cost and what we would do differently.
Articles tagged Cost optimisation
Claude Max weekly limit, measured: our Max 5x account, capped every week, used 48% to 82% less after Opus 5.5 arrived. One account only. See the data, the method and what Anthropic has published.
The best AI coding plan depends on your monthly calls. Six usage profiles priced at API list prices and matched to published plan allowances, with the arithmetic and when to switch.
AI inference costs per token fall about 13× a year for a fixed capability, yet each task uses more tokens. Track cost per task, with a worked example, not price per token.
Claude Code is free to install, but the model is what costs money. These are the real free routes, local models, free tiers and gateways, and what you give up.
Prompt caching lets an LLM reuse the part of your prompt that has not changed and bill it at a fraction of the input price. Here is how the cache, its 5-minute and 1-hour TTL, and keep-alive pings work.
Claude subscription vs API comes down to how steady your usage is. See how each is billed, how the cache TTL differs, what drives Claude Code cost and how to track it.
Most AI features are expensive because nobody measured them. Here is the routing, caching and prompt work that took one production workload from thousands to tens of dollars a month.
