Been at this a few months and I am calling it, well havent gotten a clear answer on it yet. Summing tokens out of ~/.claude and ~/.codex gets you a number but it means nothing, cache reads and output are nowhere near the same price. Split them out and price each one properly and you get a different answer. Then you notice the two of them take a different number of turns on the same job and every extra turn re-sends the whole history, which means at that point your token total is measuring how chatty the tool is rather than what it costs you. Every comparison I have read on here has that hole in it somewhere, including the ones I did myself. Closest thing to a real answer I have found is a paper from PointFive, 2,908 paid Claude Code sessions, and the result was that how much text a tool removes is close to a zero predictor of what it ends up costing. Their own study and they sell in this space so take it as you find it, per run data is on github if you want to check the numbers. So ive landed on cost per completed task off the bill rather than token counts, and I am fairly sure it is still wrong. submitted by /u/JackjaxMargam14
Originally posted by u/JackjaxMargam14 on r/ClaudeCode
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