Classification on Claude is often 10x overkill — here's the cost math.
Run the free audit →Most classification jobs don't need Sonnet. Haiku is 4x cheaper and handles the overwhelming majority. If you're still on Sonnet for simple labels, you're overpaying.
Three patterns dominate the waste on this workload: (1) context that gets re-sent on every request; (2) retry loops on parse failures or validation errors; (3) agent/reviewer chains where intermediate steps re-read content they already processed. AIUsage's audit identifies which of the three is eating your bill.
Across six audited Claude workloads, the measured savings were 76–84% on the same prompts, blind A/B tested.
Audit my own classification tasks workload →