[Hiteshjain118]

My guess is you can push to $5k/month token usage with just a single Max subscription.

During my 30 days analysis window, I consumed $3371 of token and didn't hit rate limits even once.

I plan to keep pushing my token usage higher until I hit rate limits at least 5-10 times in a month.

[sibidharan]

I hit rate-limit every other day... 5 hour... Week... I consume my 20x weekly in 3 days! So having 2x 20x!

If I could harness $10000 worth of API usage... this is the best time, no idea how long we will get this subsidy! I wont pay $10000 out of my pockets to do the same work!

[Hiteshjain118]

I'm curious what your token/$ usage looks like, if you'd be willing to share :)

[sibidharan]

TL;DR = ~$22,720 total compute @ Opus 4.7 if no caching = $113,418 (5.9x more) - this is just one month on one server... I have 3 more servers like this where I work all time!

// Generated wit Claude

Ran this on my own ~/.claude/projects/ (933 sessions, 93,842 model calls, mix of main thread + spawned subagents). Numbers came out very close to yours in shape, different in scale.

cost.py (Opus 4.7 list rates, main thread only):

  cache reads (re-reading context)   21.69B tok   $10,843   56%
  cache writes (1h)                     678M tok   $6,781   35%
  output (incl. reasoning)             63.5M tok   $1,589    8%
  fresh uncached input                  1.6M tok       $8    0%
  TOTAL                              22.43B tok   $19,221

  if no caching: $113,418 (5.9x more)
  input:output ratio: 353:1
  cache hit rate: 97.0%

token_time_breakdown.py (179M unique tokens, 166h wall clock):

  reasoning (hidden thinking)   29% of tokens,  102h (61%) of time
  bash                           1.4%           23h (14%)
  writing tool calls             4%             14h  (8%)
  summaries                      2.5%            9h  (5%)
  reading/searching/web          1.6%            7h  (4%)
  subagents                      0.2%            6h  (4%)
  editing                        0.1%            5h  (3%)
  pasted attachments             25.3%           -
  typed prompt                   34.4%           -
  system+tools                   1.4%            -

reread_breakdown.py (per-activity share of billed input):

  reasoning           59.5%   (~$11.4k of the bill is re-sending old
                               hidden thinking back to the model)
  attachments         22.6%
  tool calls           7.8%
  bash                 3.0%
  reading/web          2.4%
  my prompt            1.6%
  summaries            1.5%
  system+tools         0.8%
  subagents            0.4%

main_vs_sidecar.py:

                          main         sidecar      combined
  sessions/agents          449         484           933
  assistant calls       63,820      30,022        93,842
  cache hit             97.0%        94.4%         96.6%
  turns/agent             142 (median 20, max 11,058 in one session)
                                       62 (median 44)
  reasoning % of out    82%          51%           77%
  cost @ Opus 4.7    $19,225       $3,495       $22,720

  sidecar = 32% of calls but only 15% of cost. Subagents are doing
  their job (cheap, focused, short context).

Same shape as yours: re-read dominates, reasoning is the biggest re-read line, caching is the only thing keeping it sane. The one that surprised me was a single 11,058-turn main session - some autonomous loop I forgot to kill. Going to grep for that.

Repo: github.com/Coral-Bricks-AI/coral-ai/tree/main/claude-code-token-xray

[Hiteshjain118]

Thanks for sharing your workload. Impressive! And this one person(you) steering all this token usage across the month? I want to double click on -- if the prices were to go high, you wouldn't be spending these many tokens. Would you just delay all those projects?

[sibidharan]

Its just me steering all tokens... Multiple projects for my bootstrapped Academy, running parallel researches on things I wouldn't do myself, and deriving the right patterns for the future. Using different Max on same machine. I have similar ~$22K on another machine, where I am working in parallel with the same 2xMax subscriptions!

So if the prices were to go high, I honestly have no idea at the moment. I might need a rehabilitation centre!!!

But I am mentally prepared that someday this will be gone... So make hay while the sun shines! I am doing the most complex of all works I want to do... And pushing the limits. Knowing how much it costs in actual tokens, I give me some kind of seriousness, like an invisible funding that I must use to grow!! Considering this like a launchpad... If any of the projects hit and scale and I get some funding in future, then I might not need to worry when prices go high. So either this or rehab lol !

[Hiteshjain118]

More power to you!

[nbbaier]

It's hard for me to figure out what to use all those tokens for