---
title: "ccusage"
date: 2026-05-27
tags: post
---

Inspired by a [recent Simon Willison post](https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/), I just ran `ccusage` on my laptop and learned that over the past thirty days, on my sole subscription of $200 a month for Claude, I have consumed $2,422.13 worth of tokens. [^1]

Talk about getting my money's worth.

It is interesting — and a little bracing — to think about the hypothetical world in which no prosumer subsidy exists, and I would have to actually pay $2,422.13 to receive the output of these tokens.

First off, I think my usage patterns would change *dramatically*. The vast majority of these tokens are spent on Buttondown, and at that price point Anthropic would be the second-largest vendor on the Buttondown books, behind only Stripe. And this doesn't even include anyone else on the team. I would imagine that my actual spend would, in that world, dwindle to a third or a fourth of its current size — not because the marginal cost outweighs the marginal value, but because there is simply so much low-hanging fruit. I am generally in the business of saving $1,000 a month if it's easy to do so.

---

Two other notes prompted by Simon's essay.

One: LLM spending, at least from the outside, feels like a bit of a bokeh. I know many companies have grown much more sophisticated about this in the past four years, but during my time at Stripe and Amazon, a lot of the *efficiency* work [^2] was not really spent doing fancy backbreaking things — it was spent figuring out which fleets of servers were simply collecting dust because some random team had turned them on six months ago and never spun them down. I joke a lot that my single most meaningful contribution to Amazon was saving us tens of millions of dollars a year because I had the great fortune of realizing one of our ad-hoc clusters for one-off jobs was not scaling down, and we were therefore burning a huge amount of money for no reason in particular.

LLM spend, at the org-chart level, smells identical to me. Distributed, badly telemetered, growing fast enough that no one at the top has had time to build intuition for what *right* looks like.

Two: my already fervent interest in local LLMs — and getting to the point where I can run some of the more recent engineering-grade models locally — would, in that hypothetical world, become the single highest-leverage thing I could do from a financial standpoint. The calculus on local inference is not just an aesthetic or moral preference (see [[uber-for-tokens]]); it is also an economic one, and one that I suspect will become increasingly load-bearing.

[^1]: All of this elides the fact that `ccusage` anchors onto something that is itself slightly lossy: we have to take as given the assumption that the unit cost of tokens through metered billing for companies like Anthropic is, in and of itself, profitable. I suspect that it is. But it's worth calling out, since the entire $2,422.13 number rests on it.
[^2]: "Efficiency" being the buzzword used to mean, roughly, *we would like to lower our OpEx in preparation for either the next quarterly earnings report or the next round of layoffs.*