20 plain-language answers. No hype, no sales. If any of these questions live in your head, start here.
Run the free audit →Most Claude API bills are 60–85% waste — retries on malformed output, redundant system prompts, agent chains that re-read context at every step. The prompts you wrote aren't the problem; the patterns around them are. AIUsage audits your last 30 days and shows you exactly where it goes.
The three biggest waste patterns: retries on JSON parse failures, full system prompt re-sent every request, and agent loops that re-read the same files. Fixing those by hand is weeks of work. Paste your last 30 days at aiusage.ai and see the delta in two minutes, no signup.
Depends on your workload shape. A support auto-reply at $1,840/month is overpriced. A research-loop agency at $2,490 is overpriced. A $145 daily coding assistant is overpriced. On all six verified workloads, 76–84% of the bill was removable without touching the outputs.
The mechanism is the moat — we don't describe it publicly. The proof is the audit number: paste your last 30 days, see what you would have paid. If the delta isn't above 40%, we say so and you walk.
No. We blind A/B tested 50-sample batches on every verified case. No team has been able to distinguish AIUsage outputs from original Claude outputs.
One line — your Anthropic API endpoint. Your prompts don't change. Your model choice doesn't change. Your Claude key doesn't leave your possession.
It's forwarded transparently to Anthropic and never stored. All server-side processing uses hashes only, never raw prompt content.
No. OpenClaw wrapped Claude Code subscriptions (and was banned by Anthropic in April 2026 for that reason). AIUsage operates at the API level on paid API traffic, not at the subscription level. Anthropic's OpenClaw ban doesn't touch us.
You can. But switching models means re-testing every prompt, re-evaluating output quality across every workflow, and losing access to Claude's specific strengths. AIUsage is for teams who want to stay on Claude and pay less, not teams who want to leave Claude.
Yes. AIUsage works with any Anthropic-compatible client — Claude Code, Cursor, Continue.dev, Aider, the Anthropic SDK directly, or your own custom stack.
The audit tells you upfront. If your expected delta is under 40%, the tool says so and you walk — no signup, no commitment, no email capture.
Indistinguishable in practice. Overhead is under 50ms on request, which is a fraction of Claude's own thinking time (typically 2–30 seconds).
The audit is free and requires no signup. Pricing kicks in when you actually start routing traffic. Pay-as-you-go, no monthly minimum, no annual commit.
Developers, indie hackers, and small SaaS teams running Claude at $100+/month. Especially heavy: support automation, agent loops, code review bots, daily coding assistants, research/draft/critique chains.
Pull last 30 days from Anthropic's usage dashboard, group requests by prompt template, compute tokens-in vs tokens-out per group, flag anything with a retry-rate above 5%. AIUsage does all of this automatically in under two minutes.
For some workloads, yes — caching alone can save 20–40% if you manually wire cache_control correctly. Most teams haven't. AIUsage captures that plus everything else, with no config.
Per-request metadata (token counts, cost, timestamp, model) and content hashes for optimization lookups. Raw prompt content is never stored. Your API key is never written to disk or logs.
Not at the current stage — AIUsage is a managed service. If you need fully self-hosted, paste a note at aiusage.ai and we'll let you know when that's available.
Yes. Streaming, tools, vision, all of Anthropic's features work unchanged.
The audit is free because the proof is the number. If it lands, you move your workload. If it doesn't, you walk — we didn't cost you anything. Long-term, we make money on successfully-audited usage.