The problem nobody warned me about Same prompts. Same workflows. Same model. Higher bill — every single week. I checked my logs expecting to find a spike in usage. Instead I found something stranger: the same prompt returning different token counts on different runs. Some runs were 30–47% higher than identical runs a few weeks earlier. No input change. No structural change. Just more tokens — and a cost bill I could not explain. After going through Reddit threads, developer forums, and an OpenRouter analysis of over 1M+ real API requests, here is what is actually happening and the six changes that brought my token usage back under control. What changed under the hood Three things shifted simultaneously, and most cost-increase explanations only mention one of them. 1. The tokenizer itself changed Claude's tokenizer now splits text differently. Same input produces more token segments. The expected increase from this alone is roughly 1.0x–1.35x.…