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I burned $30 in Claude Code in just under an hour. I was equally frustrated and impressed. So much so I ended up a $200 MAX subscriber.

The money starts adding up fast as your context fills up since it's resending the whole accumulated context back through the api every time.

They're good about telling you how full your context is, and you can use /compact to shrink it down to the essentials.

But for those of us who aren't Mr. MoneyBags like you all, keeping an eye on context size is key to keeping costs low.

I’ve been wanting to try Claude Code. What makes it such a difference maker compared to existing AI tools?

Can I assume you are still running into rate limits?

The problem with it is that it uses a 30k~ token system prompt (albeit "cached"), and very quickly the usage goes up to a few million. I can easily spend over $10 a day.

I spent $5 in 10 minutes when I tried it.

For me, it was $10 in 2 hours. That’s super cheap if it saves me significant time. Jury’s out on that, though.