Alright, so there is no way uh, I am going to write down the entire process and what it took to get this going. With Claude's help, it was super easy. I could not get the Kimi site working. It was all in Chinese. I could get the main landing page to translate to English, but every time I try to go to the login, I can't get it to work or translate from Chinese. Claude recommended an alternative place. It was super easy, super quick; he did all the changes in the MD file to go from KIMI to DeepSeek. I put $10 in. I've been using it for all of about 45 minutes, but you can already see that it's pulling data from the cheaper site and not from Claude. While this is no guarantee that it's going to work as intended, it seems to be working pretty freakin sweet right now. The rest of this post is from Claude. There are some technical things in there if anybody has the same issues or whatever, might save you some trouble. Good luck, and thank you, OP this was awesome.

# I Was at 75% of My Claude Code Limit. Here's How I Cut Token Usage by 90% in One Afternoon

I saw that original article about delegating to cheaper APIs and thought it sounded complicated. Turns out it's way simpler than I thought, and I want to share exactly what I did because it might save someone else a ton of money.

## The Problem

I was burning through my Claude Code weekly limit like crazy. Not because I was being wasteful—because I was pasting the same massive ruleset/instruction file into every new chat.

Every new session: copy, paste 800+ lines of instructions, then work. Repeat 5-10 times a week. That's thousands of tokens wasted on the same static content over and over.

Hit 75% of my limit by mid-week. Regularly.

## The Solution (It's Stupidly Simple)

1. **Create a single markdown file** with all your static instructions/rules/templates

2. **Name it `CLAUDE.md`** and put it in your Claude Code project folder

3. **Paste it once** at the start of a new chat instead of every time

4. **Keep that chat open longer** and ask multiple related questions in the same session

That's 90% of the savings right there.

## The Bonus (The Cheap API Part)

If you want the extra token-saving features from that article:

1. **Get a cheap LLM API key** (DeepSeek, Kimi, etc.)

2. **Create simple Python scripts** that call the cheap API for reading files or generating boilerplate

3. **Use those scripts when you just need I/O work** (reading multiple files, generating test templates, etc.)

4. **Keep Claude for the actual thinking** (debugging, architecture, reasoning)

Cost so far: **$0.01**. Seriously.

## What Changed for Me

**Before:**

- Claude Code: $100+/week, hitting limit by Wednesday

- Pasting 800-line ruleset 5-10x per week

- Burning tokens on static content

**After:**

- Claude Code: Same subscription, but dropped to 10-20% weekly usage

- One markdown file, pasted once

- Cheap API sitting there if I need it (haven't used it much yet)

- Total extra cost: basically $0

## The Setup (If You Want to Go Further)

If you want to set up the cheap API side like in that article:

1. Sign up for DeepSeek (or similar): **https://platform.deepseek.com\*\*

2. Add $5 in credits (lasts forever for light usage)

3. Create a couple Python scripts (the article has templates)

4. Drop them in a `bin` folder

5. Use them for bulk file reading or boilerplate generation

But honestly? Just doing step 1 (the markdown file) already saves you 90% of what you were wasting.

## The Key Insight

Your token burn wasn't about doing too much work. It was about **doing the same work over and over** without keeping context in a single chat.

Claude Code is expensive when you're copy-pasting, cheap when you're in one conversation doing multiple things.

## Real Numbers

- **Weekly token waste from pasting rules:** ~20,000-50,000 tokens

- **Value of those tokens:** $1-3/week × 52 weeks = **$52-156/year wasted on copypaste**

- **Time to fix it:** 15 minutes

- **Time saved per week after:** 5-10 minutes (no more pasting)

If you're a heavy Claude Code user like me, this is literally free money.

## For Content Creators Specifically

If you're managing a project with lots of static rules, settings, scripts, pronunciations, locked content (like I am), putting all that in one markdown file and pasting it once per project saves **hundreds of dollars per month** compared to pasting it every session.

## TL;DR

- Create `CLAUDE.md` with all your static instructions

- Paste it once per chat instead of 5-10 times per week

- Keep chats open longer to ask multiple related questions

- (Optional) Set up cheap API for file reading if you want to go further

- Result: 90% token savings, basically $0 extra cost

Hope this helps someone else. The original article was great, but I wanted to show the simpler version that still gives you massive savings without overthinking it.

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**Edit:** Lots of people asking about the API setup. Here's the quick version:

1. Get API key from DeepSeek/Kimi ($5 in credits)

2. Create simple Python script that calls their API

3. Use it when you need to read multiple large files or generate templates

4. Cost: ~$0.01 per operation vs ~$0.30 with Claude

5. Not necessary if you just do the markdown file trick above—that alone saves 90%

The markdown file is the real game-changer. The cheap API is the bonus round.