I Was Wasting Money on AI (Here Is How I Cut My Bill by a Third)

My Claude bill kept creeping up and I could not figure out why. The usage looked normal. The work looked normal. The number kept climbing anyway.

Turned out the problem was me.

Doing your thinking in the expensive seat

I was doing all my thinking and planning inside the most expensive model. Every "hmm, what about this," every false start, every "actually, let me rephrase that," all of it burning the premium rate.

Using Opus for lighter tasks is a bad idea. That is like renting a Ferrari to pick up groceries. It works, but you are paying supercar money to haul a bag of apples four blocks (and you cannot even fit the apples in the trunk).

Match the model to the job. You do not need your most powerful tool to brainstorm a grocery list.

Plan cheap, run heavy

Now I plan in regular chat. I use Sonnet for the lighter tasks: drafting, summarizing, the back-and-forth where I am still figuring out what I actually want.

Once the plan is clean, I paste it into the heavy tool and let that run the part that genuinely needs the horsepower. Same work, same quality, but I stopped paying premium prices for the thinking-out-loud phase.

Bill dropped by a third. Go look at where you are doing your thinking.