Why are my messages costing so much?
Understanding where the costs in AI come from.
1 min read Last updated Jan 31, 2025
Some of the more common reasons for this include:
- You are using an “expensive” model (such as Opus, o1) (see here for alternatives that you can try)
- You are feeding too much information to the AI, either in words before, or the number of codex entries
- You are in a chat that has a long chain of messages (we only read up a fixed amount of messages, but if these are long, then this can add up)
- Your prompts are repeating information - for example, if your prompt has
{context.codex}in twice, then every codex entry will be appear twice in your prompt. - The AI is giving you large outputs. As output tokens are more expensive than input tokens, this will increase the price.
The quickest way to see what is causing your prompt to cost so much is to go to the prompt preview, or to check your AI vendor for message costs.