Last December, I discovered a small open-source project that became quite popular called pxpipe that started trending on GitHub with a claim that sounds like a billing error: the same Claude Code session that cost $42.21 as plain text cost $4.51 when the bulky parts of the request were converted into PNG images before leaving the machine.
Same model, same task, same answers. The only difference was that the model read most of its context with its eyes instead of its tokenizer. It sounded silly, but it worked: type text, capture it as an image, deliver it to the LLMs so it can be tokenized as text again.
The A/B that made the rounds: same session, $42.21 as text versus $4.51 with imaged context. Source: pxpipe repo (MIT).
That number is worth taking apart, because the mechanism behind it is bigger than one tool. It explains a real cost lever for anyone running agents or long-context pipelines. And it connects to a second question that most people haven't linked to it yet: when an AI system fetches your website in real time, what does it actually see? The answer, increasingly, involves the same vision channel.
The mechanic: images are billed by pixels, not by characters
