Bypassing the AI Token tax: converting massive codebases to images to save 60%

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?