How to Cut Your Claude Code Bill by 40% This Week
TokenCheat Team
4/19/2026
Most teams leak money in the same three places: uncached prompts, fat tool payloads, and flagship models on grunt work.
Start with cache reads
If your stable system prompt and long context blocks are not hitting Anthropic cache reads, you are paying full input rates on every turn. Measure cache hit ratio for a day; if it is under ~30%, fix prompt stability before you touch models.
Shrink MCP surface
Every tool definition and JSON round-trip adds input tokens. Remove tools your agents rarely call; summarize tool output before re-injecting.
Route models like traffic
Lint, format, and shallow edits do not need Opus. Put a hard rule: Sonnet-class for multi-file refactors; Haiku or a fast open model for rote tasks. The rate spread makes the case (verified 2026-07-02):
| Model | Input /1M | Output /1M | Cache read /1M |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.8 | $5.00 | $25.00 | $0.50 |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00* | $10.00* | $0.20 |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 | $5.00 | $0.10 |
* Intro pricing through 2026-08-31; $3/$15 after.
Every rote task routed from Opus 4.8 to Haiku 4.5 costs 5× less on both input and output. Combine that with cache reads at 10% of the input rate and the same session can land at a fraction of its naive cost.
TokenCheat exists to make these tradeoffs visible — not to shame usage, but to ship cheaper without shipping worse software. Price your own week of sessions with the Claude Code cost calculator.