Headroom

How to reduce Claude Code token usage and costs

We've all experienced it: running out of Claude Code usage halfway through your coding project. It's a frustrating experience, designed to get you to upgrade your plan. This happens because of multiple reasons:

  • Claude Code often repeatedly reads the same files, logs, search results, and other noisy context across a session.
  • The files it reads contain a lot of noisy information: long logs, HTML boilerplate, unnecessary formatting.
  • Local commands Claude Code runs trigger even more noisy input: terminal outputs, build logs, test results.
This all adds up to a lot of unnecessary token usage. Thankfully, there are a ton of tools out there to help you cut that waste and get more value out of your Claude Code plan without impacting the quality of its outputs. In this guide, we list our favorites.

Recommended tools

We recommend using a small stack of tools that each tackle a different source of token waste.

  1. RTK reduces noisy terminal output so Claude Code sees the important parts of command results without all the extra clutter.
  2. Distill compresses and reshapes text-heavy inputs so large documents and other verbose context take fewer tokens.
  3. Headroom trims prompt bloat while preserving the structure and information Claude Code needs to work effectively.
  4. MemStack helps manage persistent coding context so useful information sticks around without forcing every session to start from scratch.

Or you can download the Extra Headroom app below, which bundles all these tools in one easy installer.

What results should you expect?

Don’t expect every prompt to suddenly cost half as much. Do expect the noisy stuff to get dramatically cheaper. Across normal usage, combining these tools cuts Claude Code token costs by around 50%, which means you get about 2x more usage out of the Claude plan you already have.

Try it on a real workflow

Download the app, run a Claude Code task you already do every day, and compare token usage before and after.

Download for free

macOS only · Linux coming soon