In a nutshell: Anthropic shows in a blog post practical measures such as /clear, /context, /compact, @-mentions, and fixed model selection with which developers can specifically reduce token consumption and thus the costs of Claude Code sessions.
In a blog post, Anthropic explains what determines the price of a token in Claude Code and how the number of unnecessarily consumed tokens per session can be reduced. Unlike classic development tools with flat pricing, agent-based coding tools like Claude Code can incur different costs for the same task depending on how the work is carried out.
In the post, Anthropic compares two scenarios for the same bug fix: In one session, Claude reads the test and the affected file in a targeted manner, makes the change, and finishes after a few turns. In another, Claude first searches the entire repository, reading dozens of files on the way to the same two relevant locations — and all of this read context remains in memory for the rest of the conversation, making every subsequent turn more expensive. The result is identical, but token consumption differs significantly. According to Anthropic, efficient token usage does not fundamentally mean fewer tokens, but rather that the tokens used actually contribute to the task at hand.
According to the post, the price of a token depends on three factors: the model used, whether it is an input or output token, and whether the token was served from the cache. A larger model does more work on both input and output tokens and is correspondingly more expensive — which model makes sense for which task is covered by Anthropic in a separate post (“Choosing a Claude model and effort level in Claude Code”). The rule of thumb: use larger models for genuinely difficult or ambiguous problems, and smaller ones for routine work.
For practical use, Anthropic names several concrete measures: The /clear command should be run between individual tasks so that irrelevant context from previous tasks is not sent to the model again. Model and effort level should be set before starting a session, since changing them mid-conversation can invalidate the prompt cache and thereby increase costs. Files should be referenced via @-mention rather than merely named, since this attaches them directly to the message, eliminating the need for an additional read or search call.
For commands with a lot of output text, Anthropic recommends quiet flags or running them in a subagent, since the command output is embedded into the conversation like a file and remains there for the rest of the session. The /context command should be run once at the start of a fresh session to see what is already loaded (such as CLAUDE.md files or MCP tool definitions) so that unnecessary items can be removed. Before longer breaks, Anthropic recommends /compact, since the prompt cache expires after one hour and summarizing a conversation is cheaper while it is still in the cache.
Source: claude.com · Published August 13, 2026
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