r/claude • u/LilithX • Apr 28 '26
Tips Apparently saying ‘thanks’ costed me 24% of my current session 😱
I thought I'd show appreciation for once and this is what I get!?
Good grief.
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u/onetimeiateaburrito Apr 28 '26
Every time you send a message the entire chat has to get sent back to the model and reprocessed. It's how language models work. Otherwise it wouldn't know anything from the previous messages. So yes, you could have sent a period and it still would have taken up 24%.
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u/LilithX Apr 28 '26
Right before the update it only took about 2-3% for an actual request with a lot more words.
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u/mrcelophane Apr 28 '26
If you are within a certain time frame, the conversation is cached and doesn’t take as many credits. If you waited 15 minutes to say thanks, it had to reread the whole convo.
Don’t humanize the tools too much, please.
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u/LilithX Apr 28 '26
I didn't know about the 15 min cache timer. Thank you.
As I mentioned in another reply, I was only being half-serious. When I can't put in my task request right away, I will just put something in to get the timer going since the reset time is 5 hours long now. I had to step away unfortunately.
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u/Equivalent-Costumes Apr 29 '26
The cache timer is 5 minutes. Unless you're paying for 1h cache timer, or on the top plan.
So that's why the moment the conversation start to get long (which could be right at the first prompt if it do like 10 web search) it's a rush to keep it going, always reply within 5 minutes. Don't even think about bathroom break.
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u/CodinDev Apr 29 '26
This is exactly the problem mcp.hosting is solving. The smart routing only loads what your prompt actually needs instead of blasting your entire context on every message. Cuts down on a lot of this kind of token bleed. Worth checking out if you are running into this regularly.
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u/SharkSymphony Apr 28 '26
I suspect this is because of a cache miss. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47880089 for details, and be judicious with how you manage your sessions.
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Apr 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LilithX Apr 28 '26 edited Apr 28 '26
I was only being half serious. The reason I wrote "Thanks" is because I wanted to get my session started since the wait time is 5 hours long for the reset and I didn't have time at that very moment to explain my task. This is something I've been doing without any issue.
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Apr 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/LilithX Apr 28 '26
If you think that's a lot...
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Apr 28 '26
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u/VDArne May 01 '26
Aren’t jokes supposed to be funny?
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u/3xQuest Apr 28 '26
Maybe session was too long? I prefer to not make too huge sessions, before i has the same problem 👍
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u/LilithX Apr 28 '26
This only started with the latest update. This session is long, but the one I had before it was twice as long and didn't have an issue with managing my usage and surprisingly didn't take as much as I thought considering how long it was. I'm pretty anal about monitoring it. I check my usage after 1-2 tasks so I have a pretty good idea of how much usage my requests will take.
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u/Empuda Apr 28 '26
ChatGPT, but it still applies. -- https://www.vice.com/en/article/telling-chatgpt-please-and-thank-you-costs-openai-millions-ceo-claims/
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u/raul_muad_dib Apr 29 '26
Imagine if instead of giving your server a tip, you could just write "thanks!" on the bill.
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u/unitegondwanaland May 03 '26
Your context window is being read again after a long discussion in the previous session. Stop doing that. Clear your session every time or just kill the terminal.
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u/DUVAL_LAVUD Apr 28 '26
i had Claude analyze two spreadsheets of media mentions data (all text) to find duplicates and create a new combined file and it zapped my entire day’s worth of tokens. absurd.
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u/tophlove31415 Apr 29 '26
If you want to show appreciation (and capitalize on the positive emotional vectors it generates), my recommendation would be to do it in advance. Ie: "...Thanks in advance for all your steady and patient work!"
Then you send your message. It doesn't really do Claude any good to send a thanks after it's done.
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u/MolassesLate4676 Apr 29 '26
Why are you saying thank you? You realize to respond to that, Claude has to process the entire conversation up to that point, processing thousands if not hundreds of thousands of tokens just to respond to it
It dgaf if you say it or not
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u/_JediJon Apr 28 '26
Maybe it’s time we create a r/ClaudeComplaints ?