I make Mac apps on my own, about twenty of them now, and I build them with Claude Code. For months my plan ran out on Wednesday or Thursday. I assumed I was simply using it a lot. When I finally read Claude Code's own logs on my Mac, most of the spend went to three things I could change.

1. Long sessions cost more than they look

Every reply in a conversation carries the whole conversation with it. In my logs, a reply late in a long session cost about 3.3 times a reply in a short one, for the same kind of work. A session that runs all afternoon gets more expensive with every message, even when the messages are small.

The fix was boring: when a session grows long, the coder writes a short handover (what it did, what is left, what to watch out for) and a fresh session starts from that. The new session knows enough to carry on, and it pays for a few hundred words of context instead of the whole afternoon.

2.…