The Token Efficiency Mindset - Why Your Claude Conversations Cost More Than They Should
TL;DR Token costs don’t scale linearly with productivity - the context window compounds with every follow-up message, so a five-message conversation can cost 2-3x more than one well-structured request Compression is your biggest lever: cutting a prompt in half before sending it reduces cost and often improves answer quality by removing noise Batch tasks that share context together; don’t batch unrelated tasks - real batching spreads the setup cost across related work Build reusable systems (templates, project files, prompt prefixes) instead of solving the same problem repeatedly and paying the context cost each time Prompt caching can cut input token costs by 80-90% on workloads with stable prefixes - the single biggest structural saving most teams are missing If you’re paying attention to your Claude usage, you’ve probably noticed something: your token bills don’t scale linearly with your productivity. Sometimes a conversation that feels quick costs three times more than expected. Other conversations that took hours feel suspiciously cheap. ...