I'm using Claude for content creation, but my tokens get used up pretty quickly. Does anyone have tips for reducing token usage while still getting good results in one go? I'm looking for prompt-writing or workflow strategies that help avoid multiple iterations, since it takes 1 3 hours for my tokens to reset.
Like a lot of you, my API bills have been crazy lately from feeding entire directories and massive logs into the context window for hours.
I noticed a structural loophole in how models are priced: text tokens are billed by character density, but vision tokens are billed by flat image dimensions.
I started taking my massive text payloads and converting them into heavily compressed, high-density PNGs before uploading them to Claude and Gemini. It forces the model to use its OCR, and it actually drops the context cost by about 60% while retaining perfect accuracy.
Has anyone else experimented with multimodal hacks like this to save on API credits, or are you mostly relying on RAG and prompt trimming to keep costs down?
