I’ve been on Max for two months and I finally sat down and tracked where my tokens actually go. breakdown of a typical day:
- ~40% file reads, git status, project context scanning: stuff that doesn’t need opus at all
- ~25% test generation, scaffolding, boilerplate: sonnet handles this identically
- ~20% formatting, renaming, simple refactors: literally any model works
- ~15% actual hard reasoning, cross-file architecture: the only part that needs opus So i’m paying $200/month for the 15% that actually needs a frontier model. the other 85% is burning premium tokens on tasks a $0.28/MTok model does just as well. Switched to API with routing rules. sonnet for the routine stuff, opus only when it needs to reason across multiple files. monthly cost went from $200 to about $30 and the output quality is identical because the hard tasks still get opus. The subscription model is designed to hide this from you. no token breakdown, no per-task cost visibility, just a quota that mysteriously shrinks. submitted by /u/spencer_kw
Originally posted by u/spencer_kw on r/ClaudeCode
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