They have added prompt caching, which can mitigate this. I largely agree though, and one of the reasons I don’t use Claude Code much is the unpredictable cost. Like many of us, I am already paying for all the frontier model providers as well as various API usage, plus Cursor and GitHub, just trying to keep up.

Honestly Cline and Roo Code are so far ahead of the vendors native tools (and cursor etc) too.