I spent $514 on Claude Code in 30 days. Here's what I learned.

Real data from 50 sessions. The good, the bad, and the expensive.

The setup

For the past month, I've been tracking every Claude Code session with claudestat — an open-source tool I built to monitor token usage, costs, and patterns.

This isn't a hypothetical study. These are my real numbers from real work on real projects.

The numbers

30-day period: April 12, 2026 → May 10, 2026

Metric Value

Total spent $514.86

Sessions 50

Total tokens 3,803,319

Loops detected 375

Avg efficiency 69/100

That's about $18/day on average. For context: I'm on Max 5, so this isn't cheap.

The most expensive session

April 26, 2026 — I let Claude run on a refactoring project for hours without checking:

Cost: $32.94

Loops detected: 31

Efficiency score: 35/100

What happened: Claude went in circles editing files, each edit triggering more edits. I wasn't watching.

That's $33 in one session.…