Claude Code Is Burning Your Token Budget. Here's the Receipt.
Claude Code Is Burning Your Token Budget. Here's the Receipt. I found $2,500/year of hidden token waste in my Claude Code setup. It was the MCP servers. The Discovery Last week I noticed my Claude Code conversations were dying at around message 15. Context window full. The model starts forgetting earlier instructions. Tool calls fail. The conversation degrades into hallucination. I assumed it was my fault — too many messages, too much context. So I started measuring. Here's what I found: Session start: Claude system prompt: ~8,000 tokens MCP schema injection: ~111,000 tokens User's first message: 50 tokens ────────────────────────────────────────── Total before any work: ~119,000 tokens Remaining context: ~81,000 tokens I was starting every conversation with 60% of my context already consumed. The culprit wasn't my prompts. It was the 10 MCP servers I had proudly configured in my claude_desktop_config.json . The Receipts I measured each server's schema injection using tiktoken: Server Why I Installed It Token Cost Times Used/Week GitHub PR reviews, issues 12,440 3 Slack Message reading 14,672 0 Google Drive Doc access 47,293 1 Notion Knowledge base 13,780 2 Postgres Query DB 8,231 4 Puppeteer Screenshots 5,890 0 Filesystem File access 3,847 15 Brave Search Web search 2,103 5 Memory Context persistence 2,567 0 Sequential Thinking Reasoning 890 2 Total 111,713 Look at the "Times Used/Week" column. Three servers were used zero times. Two more were used once or twice. But every single one of them was injecting 100% of its schema into every conversation. I was paying $0.33 per conversation — $2,500/year — to load schemas for tools I barely used. The Moment I Realized Everyone Has This Problem I posted my findings on Bluesky. Within hours: "I had the same issue. Removed 6 MCP servers and my conversations went from dying at message 15 to lasting 40+ messages." — @developer1 "GitHub MCP is 12K tokens but Claude Code already has gh CLI built in. Why did I install it?" — @dev