Over an 800-hour autonomous run I tried a lot of things to bring the token bill down. Most of the gains came from just five small habits. Here they are — each one is a win you can copy today, and every one is free.
The good news up front: you don't need a complicated setup to spend a lot less. The five changes below are the ones that kept paying off, turn after turn — leaner sessions, calmer bills, and faster replies as a bonus. Start with the first one; it did the most.
Starting a new session (/clear) whenever I switched topics turned out to be the biggest lever by far. A long session keeps re-sending its whole history every turn, so the per-turn cost quietly climbs as it grows. Clearing between unrelated tasks keeps every session short and the prompt small.
Result: each turn stays cheap instead of getting ~10× pricier by turn 200, and replies come back faster because the model re-reads less.
Habit: one task, one session. When you move to something unrelated, /clear and begin fresh.
Opus is wonderful for hard reasoning, but most routine work — edits, refactors, file shuffling, running commands — lands just as well on Sonnet, which is several times cheaper per token. Setting Sonnet as the default for ordinary turns and reaching for Opus only when a problem actually needs it was the change that moved the monthly number the most.
/model sonnet # everyday work /model opus # bring it back for the genuinely hard problems
Result: the bulk of my turns ran on the cheaper model, and I honestly couldn't tell the difference on routine work.
When a session does need to run long, calling /compact yourself at a natural breakpoint (after finishing a sub-task) keeps it tidy and predictable. Doing it on purpose, rather than waiting for the automatic trigger to fire deep in a huge context, kept the summaries small and the flow uninterrupted.
Result: long sessions stayed lean and steady, with no surprise pauses to re-summarize a giant transcript.
Once I could actually see the numbers, the whole thing stopped feeling mysterious. The free, open-source ccusage reads your local session logs and shows a per-session breakdown, so you learn your own normal range and spot anything unusual early — no bill-day surprises.
Result: spending became something I could plan around instead of guess at, which made every other habit on this list easy to keep.
Tip: a one-line check after a heavy session is enough to keep your sense of "normal" current.
Loading only what a task actually needs — trimming the files, tools, and MCP servers that get re-sent every single turn — pays off continuously, because anything in the context is paid for on every turn it survives. A tidy context is cheaper and snappier.
Result: lighter prompts, quicker replies, and a smaller bill, all from the same habit.
If you do just these, you'll feel it on the next bill:
/clear when you switch tasks — keep sessions short/compact on purpose at natural breakpointsccusage so you know your normal