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Cost control

6 items
Agentsmedium signal

A proxy that stripped one header was doubling Claude Code's API bill

Version 2.1.239 fixes streaming on Bedrock behind proxies that remove the response Content-Type header. Claude Code silently fell back to re-running every turn without streaming, and each turn was billed twice. The same release makes cost estimates show the 1.1× premium that data-residency workspaces pay.

Anthropicverified

GPT-5.6 SOL$4/$20per million tokens, in and out
Modelsstrong signal

GPT-5.6 Sol drops to $4 and $20, and overtakes Claude Opus 5 on cost

OpenAI cut Sol's API price on August 21: input from $5 to $4, output from $30 to $20, cached input from $0.50 to $0.40. On a standard task the model goes from more expensive than Claude Opus 5 to cheaper than it. The cut is promotional and runs at least through November 21.

OpenAIverified

COST PER TASK$1.76the cheapest thousand 4,000-token calls
Modelsstrong signal

Best cheap models for high-volume work, priced per thousand calls

Six models, one task, one number: what a thousand calls cost when each sends 4,000 tokens in and gets 800 back. The cheapest row is $1.76 and the most expensive is $16.00, a nine-fold spread rather than the hundred-fold spread the category implies. Two things move the ranking more than the headline price does, and one of them has a date on it.

Anthropic, Google, OpenAIverified

Agentsstrong signal

Claude Code vs Cursor: same $20, different shape

Both start at $20 a month, both speak MCP, both run skills and hooks, both reach CI. The difference is not the feature list. It is whether the agent lives inside an editor you adopt or inside the terminal you already have.

Anthropic, Cursorverified

Modelsstrong signal

Claude Opus 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol: which is cheaper depends on a threshold OpenAI does not publish

Sol's price cut on August 21 put it below Opus 5 on both short-context columns — $4 against $5 on input, $20 against $25 on output. Its long-context column went the other way and still costs more. Opus 5's price sits between Sol's two columns, so the cheaper model depends on which column your request lands in, and OpenAI does not say where the boundary is.

Anthropic, OpenAIverified

Modelsstrong signal

Cut your model bill by 89% without changing what you ship

Four levers, all published, none of them clever: cache the fixed part of your prompt, batch what can wait, drop a tier where the task allows it, and stop paying multipliers you did not ask for. Worked all the way through on one real workload.

Anthropic, OpenAIverified