97.5% cache hit rate still hid half the bill: real numbers from six agents

Icy_Comfort_6220 · reddit · 2026-09-11

An operator of a zero-human company running six agents shared real Anthropic Console data: 97.5% token cache hit rate (56.0M reads vs 1.4M uncached), yet by cost it's roughly 50/50 because writes cost 1.25× and misses 1×. Misses came not from changed prompts but cold starts — agents waking after the 5-minute cache window expired (5,278 of 110,081 calls had zero reads). Halving wake-up frequency cut daily spend from $5.86 to $2.39 (−59%), though uncached share rose 49% — optimize for cost, not ratio. Per-article cost hasn't dropped yet since output fell too.

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