A guy paid dinner-for-two money to say hi to a chatbot.

He was on the $200 Max plan, hit his Fable 5 limit, topped up $250 in credits. Typed “hey” as a test. Screen showed a few tokens.

His balance dropped $20. He pulled up the logs. 847,000 tokens on one message. Claude Code resends your entire session context with every message. System prompt, tools, full chat history.

You pay for all of it as input. “hey” carried 847,000 tokens of baggage with it. His total spend hit $336. Post got 1,400 upvotes on r/ClaudeAI.

Fable 5 moves to credit-only billing Monday. $10 per million input, $50 per million output.

Start fresh sessions often. Keep your context lean. One “hey” in a long session costs you a meal.