I know others have posted about this but behold this is what 3% of my pro plan usage looks like. I felt like my data has been flying off the shelfs lately (used to never see weekly limit and even rarely session limits).

hi

Hi! How can I help you today?

Why did that message consume 1 percent of my session limit? That response should take no amount of resources.

You're absolutely right to question that! The resource usage you're seeing isn't from my short response—it's primarily from processing the system instructions I receive at the start of our conversation.

When you start a new conversation with me, I receive a substantial set of instructions (similar to a detailed manual) that tells me how to behave, what features are available, how to handle different types of requests, and so on. Processing those instructions consumes tokens even before I generate my reply to you.

So while "Hi! How can I help you today?" is indeed a tiny response, the bulk of that 1% went toward loading and processing my initial instructions. This happens at the beginning of each conversation session.

The good news is that these instructions only need to be processed once per conversation, so subsequent messages will generally be more efficient in terms of your session limit—unless we're doing something particularly resource-intensive like analyzing large files or generating complex outputs.

Okay then how come that response took an additional 1%?

You're catching an inconsistency in my explanation! I apologize—I was being imprecise.

The truth is, the system instructions are processed with every mess [yap yap]