What a pause costs in a Claude Code session
Which prompts cost the most, and why.
Filmed 2026-10-08
In one of my own sessions, three pauses cost about as much as all the work around them.
- This whole session$14.23at API list price: 58 requests on Opus 5.5
- Added by pauses$7.1350% of it: 3 pauses past the cache lifetime
- Same tokens, Sonnet 5.5$8.8038% less, $5.43 off, for the same work
Exhibit 1Where each prompt's money went
- cache read
- cache write
- output
The numbers behind the chart
| Prompt | Requests | Cache read | Cache write | Output | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 3 | 29 | $1.51 | $4.30 | $0.53 | $6.34 |
| 4 | 5 | $0.32 | $0.07 | $0.03 | $0.42 |
| 5 | 1 | $0.07 | $0.01 | $0.01 | $0.09 |
| 6 | 19 | $1.24 | $2.91 | $0.23 | $4.38 |
| 7 | 2 | $0.14 | $0.01 | $0.02 | $0.17 |
| 8 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 9 | 2 | $0.08 | $2.73 | $0.02 | $2.83 |
| All | 58 | $3.36 | $10.03 | $0.83 | $14.23 |
Exhibit 2The same two points, on the page itself
Two short clips from the film below, each with my narration. Tap one to play it. Playing one stops the other.
What to notice: the three tall bars are the three prompts that followed a pause, and most of each one is orange.
What to notice: the recorded token counts stay the same; only the price list changes.
Both clips are cut from the film further down. The Português button plays the Portuguese narration over the film's English captions, as the player below does.
Try it on your own file at sessioncost.com: it is free, and the file is read in your browser.
What this does not show. It is one session of mine, on one model, so it is an example and not an average. The $7.13 is an estimate: a session file records what each request cost, not what the API would have answered had the cache stayed warm, so the page prices those requests again with the cache read instead of written. The $8.80 is the same work on another price list: another model may take different steps, write more or less, or count tokens differently. Every figure is an API list price. On a Claude plan you are not billed per token; the session uses up your allowance instead.
The filmThe page reading this session
The film opens on the answer and spotlights the tall bars. It then drops one of my session files on the page's drop box and reprices the same session in the what-if section. The Português button under the picture plays the Portuguese narration.
The page reads the session file in your browser and uses only token counts, model names and timestamps. The text of the conversation is ignored and nothing is uploaded. Every figure is the file's own counts priced at the published list prices. A pause is flagged when the gap before a request is longer than the cache lifetime: one hour on a Claude plan, five minutes on an API key. The what-if applies another price list to the token counts that were recorded; it does not guess a new session.
What doesn't come across on video: the file arrives in the film through a scripted drop event on the page's drop box, because the recording tool cannot drag a file with a cursor. The session is one of my own working sessions, and every number on screen is read from the page, not typed into a caption. The picture has the English captions burned in. The same film with Portuguese captions (a draft) and the phone-shaped versions are listed under the player.
Full films (3)
These are the same film as the clip above, in another language or shape. Each plays in full and loads only when you press play.
Same film, Portuguese captions (draft) 1:00
The English film above with its captions in Portuguese. The Portuguese is a draft, not yet read through.
Same film, phone-shaped, English captions 1:01
Filmed on a phone-sized screen. About two seconds longer than the landscape film, so it is a separate film, not a rotation of it.
Same film, phone-shaped, Portuguese captions (draft) 1:04
The phone-shaped film with Portuguese captions. The Portuguese is a draft, not yet read through.