Budget

Save money. Same agent.

Six practical ways to drop agent cost or context waste. Three are installable tools; three are pure technique.

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all budget mcps

6 ways to save

#namesourceproof

1

cavemangeneraltool

Use when you want Claude Code (or Codex/Gemini/Cursor/30+ agents) to cut ~75% of output tokens by replying in fragment/telegraphic style — full technical accuracy, smaller mouth.

github.com

JuliusBrussee/caveman

inspect★ 59k

2

free-claude-codegeneraltool

Use when you want Claude Code to route its Anthropic Messages API traffic through a local proxy to free or cheap providers — NVIDIA NIM, Kimi, Wafer, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, LM Studio, llama.cpp, or Ollama.

github.com

Alishahryar1/free-claude-code

inspect★ 24k

3

claude-code-routergeneraltool

Put OpenRouter in front of Claude Code: one API key reaches 300+ models, so the easy turns route to a backend at 2–5% of Sonnet's price while the hard ones stay on a frontier model — and spend is visible per request from one dashboard.

github.com/musistudio

musistudio/claude-code-router

open★ 35k

4

fan out subagentsgeneraltechnique

Run independent investigations in parallel subagents so the parent context stays clean and the work finishes at the same wall-clock minute.

workflow

5

/goalgeneraltechnique

Start a session by writing explicit success criteria, non-goals, and the riskiest unknown so the agent has something concrete to steer against.

workflow

6

ask-expert-mcpgeneraltechnique

Let a cheap or open-source model escalate to a stronger one only when it gets stuck — so you pay frontier prices for the hard 5%, not the easy 95%.

workflow

How they compose

caveman cuts output tokens, free-claude-code and claude-code-router change the model bill — the latter routing through OpenRouter to the cheapest capable model, fan out subagents keeps parent context smaller, /goal keeps the work from drifting, and ask-expert-mcp reserves frontier-model spend for the hard 5% of decisions.