Claude Code Is Burning Your Token Budget. Here's the Receipt.

A developer discovered that MCP servers were silently consuming up to 111,000 tokens per conversation in Claude Code, wasting an estimated $2,500 per year. By auditing and removing unused servers, they reduced context overhead by 97% and tripled conversation length. The developer released a tool called mcptoon to compress MCP schemas.

I found $2,500/year of hidden token waste in my Claude Code setup. It was the MCP servers. Last week I noticed my Claude Code conversations were dying at around message 15. Context window full. The model starts forgetting earlier instructions. Tool calls fail. The conversation degrades into hallucination. I assumed it was my fault — too many messages, too much context. So I started measuring. Here's what I found: Session start: Claude system prompt: ~8,000 tokens MCP schema injection: ~111,000 tokens User's first message: 50 tokens ────────────────────────────────────────── Total before any work: ~119,000 tokens Remaining context: ~81,000 tokens I was starting every conversation with 60% of my context already consumed. The culprit wasn't my prompts. It was the 10 MCP servers I had proudly configured in my claude desktop config.json . I measured each server's schema injection using tiktoken: | Server | Why I Installed It | Token Cost | Times Used/Week | |---|---|---|---| | GitHub | PR reviews, issues | 12,440 | 3 | | Slack | Message reading | 14,672 | 0 | | Google Drive | Doc access | 47,293 | 1 | | Notion | Knowledge base | 13,780 | 2 | | Postgres | Query DB | 8,231 | 4 | | Puppeteer | Screenshots | 5,890 | 0 | | Filesystem | File access | 3,847 | 15 | | Brave Search | Web search | 2,103 | 5 | | Memory | Context persistence | 2,567 | 0 | | Sequential Thinking | Reasoning | 890 | 2 | Total | 111,713 | Look at the "Times Used/Week" column. Three servers were used zero times. Two more were used once or twice. But every single one of them was injecting 100% of its schema into every conversation. I was paying $0.33 per conversation — $2,500/year — to load schemas for tools I barely used. I posted my findings on Bluesky. Within hours: "I had the same issue. Removed 6 MCP servers and my conversations went from dying at message 15 to lasting 40+ messages." — @developer1 "GitHub MCP is 12K tokens but Claude Code already has gh CLI built in. Why did I install it?" — @developer2"Google Drive MCP alone is 47K tokens. FORTY SEVEN THOUSAND. For a tool I used once this month." — @developer3 This isn't a niche problem. Everyone running 5+ MCP servers is silently burning 50-100K tokens per conversation. Count token cost of each server pip install mcptoon mcptoon audit --config ~/.config/claude/claude desktop config.json Output: Filesystem: 3,847 tokens ✓ Keep used daily GitHub: 12,440 tokens ✗ Remove use gh CLI instead Google Drive: 47,293 tokens ✗ Remove use gdrive CLI Slack: 14,672 tokens ✗ Remove use slack CLI Notion: 13,780 tokens ⚠ Depends no good CLI alternative Postgres: 8,231 tokens ✓ Keep used 4x/week ... Total waste: 89,702 tokens → $1,346/year { "mcpServers": { "filesystem": { ... }, "postgres": { ... }, "brave-search": { ... } } } I went from 10 servers to 3. My context overhead dropped from 111K to 14K tokens. For servers you must keep, wrap them with mcptoon to compress schemas: { "mcpServers": { "postgres": { "command": "mcptoon", "args": "serve", "--stdio", "npx", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-postgres" } } } mcptoon compresses tool schemas by 97% using a compact TOON format. The model sees the same tools but with 3K tokens instead of 111K. | Metric | Before | After | Change | |---|---|---|---| | Context at session start | 111K tokens | 3.2K tokens | -97% | | Conversations before context death | ~15 messages | ~45 messages | 3x | | Token cost per conversation | $0.54 | $0.14 | -74% | | Monthly cost 20 conv/day × 22 days | $237 | $62 | -$175 | | Annual savings | — | — | $2,100 | This isn't just about money. The real cost of MCP schema bloat is cognitive degradation : When Perplexity's CTO announced they were replacing MCP with REST API + CLI internally, this is what he was talking about. When Garry Tan said "MCP sucks honestly," this is what he meant. When Anthropic's own engineers showed 98.7% token reduction by not loading schemas into context, this is the problem they were solving. MCP servers aren't bad. The protocol isn't bad. But loading every tool schema into context at startup is a design flaw that costs every developer thousands of dollars per year in wasted tokens. Most developers don't know this because: Now you know. Go audit your config. pip install mcptoon mcptoon audit --config your-config.json mcptoon is open source, Apache 2.0, 250KB, zero dependencies. GitHub · PyPI. All measurements use tiktoken cl100k base. Not affiliated with Anthropic.