You look at the bill and it makes no sense. You did not feel like you worked more than usual, you asked the same kinds of questions, and the counter doubled anyway. Nobody tells you where it went, so you assume you must be the one asking too much.
It is not you. I measured 681 of my own sessions: nine requests out of ten cost almost nothing. What drains your subscription is the moments when the AI keeps hammering the same file. That is one request in seven, and it eats four tenths of everything it produces.
What I did
I kept a record of all my work with an AI for four months: 681 sessions, across 41 different projects, between 17 April and 10 August 2026.
Every exchange leaves a trace of what it consumed. So I did not guess anything: I added it up.
