Claude Code's 1-Hour Cache Expiry Can Spike Your Cost by 13x
teortaxesTex · x · 2026-08-07
Empirical data reveals that leaving the coding agent Claude Code idle for over an hour and then continuing the conversation incurs a massive cost penalty.
Cost Progression:
- Continuing while working: 1x.
- After a coffee break (timeout): 1.3x.
- After a call: 1.6x.
- After lunch: 13x.
The reason is that session cache expires exactly at 60 minutes, forcing the first message to rebuild the entire context from scratch. In contrast, starting a new session costs only 4.5x. The best practice is to ask the model to summarize progress before stepping away and paste it into a fresh window later. Commenters noted that this caching mechanism is embarrassingly inferior compared to DeepSeek (TTL > 12 hours with free cache writes enabled by default).
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