What happened
A developer running Claude Code for "review loops, long running agent jobs, local automation runs" started tracking his own token logs after noticing his weekly quota emptied faster than usual. The numbers he published are specific: in a comparable week of work, visible Opus input/output tokens dropped to 1,442,423 — down from 8,927,831 and 8,477,395 in two previous heavy weeks. That's roughly 16-17% of the old volume for what he describes as the same kind of work, on the same machine, at the same subscription price.
Widen the count to include cache-creation tokens (not cache reads, just the cost of writing to cache) and the ratio holds: about 20% of the old volume. Either way, the effective cost of a unit of useful work looks close to 5x higher than before, with no announced price change from Anthropic.
The stranger detail: a fresh account created on June 29 went from roughly full quota (100% on both the 5-hour and 7-day meters) down to 65%/84% over about nine hours — with zero visible Opus rows logged locally during that window. The local usage log and the account's internal meter disagree, and there's no published explanation for why.
Why this matters for automation builders
