Claude Charges Images by Pixels: Compress Text into PNGs to Save Tokens
jbarbier · x · 2026-07-06
jbarbier pointed out that Claude charges for image inputs based on pixel dimensions rather than text content. Therefore, you can compress large blocks of context into a dense PNG image and pay via pixels instead of tokens.
He shared a code repository implementing this idea, offering a practical engineering trick to reduce API costs.
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