How I Cut My Claude API Bill 60% Without Losing Quality

I was spending $45/month on the Claude API. Not crazy money, but it bugged me because I knew most of my tokens were going to simple tasks that didn't need Opus-level reasoning. here's what worked. the problem I was calling claude-opus-4-6 for everything. Refactors, typo fixes, code reviews, architecture decisions — all Opus, all the time. At $5/$25 per million tokens (input/output), those quick "fix this import" prompts were costing the same per-token as "design me a distributed cache invalidati