I spent $514 on Claude Code in 30 days. Here's what I learned. Real data from 50 sessions. The good, the bad, and the expensive. The setup For the past month, I've been tracking every Claude Code session with claudestat — an open-source tool I built to monitor token usage, costs, and patterns. This isn't a hypothetical study. These are my real numbers from real work on real projects. The numbers 30-day period: April 12, 2026 → May 10, 2026 Metric Value Total spent $514.86 Sessions 50 Total tokens 3,803,319 Loops detected 375 Avg efficiency 69/100 That's about $18/day on average. For context: I'm on Max 5, so this isn't cheap. The most expensive session April 26, 2026 — I let Claude run on a refactoring project for hours without checking: Cost: $32.94 Loops detected: 31 Efficiency score: 35/100 What happened: Claude went in circles editing files, each edit triggering more edits. I wasn't watching. That's $33 in one session. More than my daily coffee budget for a month. Key lesson: Loops are expensive.…