Makes me think they're not using anthropic directly but rather any downstream provider. Pretty much everyone has broken caching for anthropic models, which can make requests a couple dozen times more expensive for long contexts.

I did manage to blow through about 1k in a day once doing this, so I can see how one might reach 6k with broken caching + heavy workloads.

For comparison: What cost me me $1k via openrouter would have cost me maybe the weekly allowance of a claude max x20 subscription with proper caching (so like $50 instead). Don't use credits on claude by the way. That's another ripoff (just get more subscriptions).

You really can screw this up and pay x20 what you could have.

Nope, using anthropic directly. But you're right, rewriting history busts cache and it gets expensive really fast.