Cut Burn by 70-97%
Stop paying for context you don't need. These battle-tested strategies will instantly slash your API bills without sacrificing agent performance.
1. Session Resets
Agents continuously append outputs to their context window. At 100k tokens, a single "yes" reply costs dollars.
Tactic: Clear old sessions or use a /clear command when switching sub-tasks.
2. Prompt Caching
Anthropic supports caching system prompts and large files. If your agent constantly reads a 50-page codebase, cache it.
Result: Users report a 90% drop in input token costs when reading large codebases using Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
3. Smart Model Routing
Don't use Opus for formatting JSON. Use a waterfall approach based on task complexity.
- → Haiku: Fast parsing, summaries, easy formatting
- → Sonnet: Coding, complex reasoning (Sweet Spot)
- → Opus: Heavy strategic planning
4. Strict Formatting
Agents waste tokens being polite ("Sure, I'd be happy to help with that! Here is the code...").
Tactic: Add "Respond ONLY with code, no conversational filler." to your system prompt. Use temperature 0.2.
Real Community Example
"By enforcing a 30k token auto-reset and switching my mundane tasks to Haiku via Anthropic's API, I went from burning $15/day to $1.20/day. The agent actually feels faster now."Get Anthropic API Credits