Elvis Awanchiri

I use AI tools every day and I want to know how they actually work. This is what I find out, mostly about Claude.

Written for the person paying the bill, not for engineers. I check things myself rather than repeating what everyone else says, and I show you how, so you can check me. If any of this is new to you, start at Start here.

Writing

6 Sep 2026

A PDF page now costs less than a screenshot of it

I sent one page to Claude three ways and counted each. As a screenshot it cost 4,706 tokens. As a PDF, 2,083. As plain text, 491. Advice online says a screenshot is the cheap way to send a page. It is out of date.

What one page costs, in tokens, on the newer versions
as plain text491 tokens
as a one-page PDF2,083 tokens
as a screenshot4,706 tokens

Counted 6 September 2026 with Anthropic's own free token counter. Four of the eight versions of Claude I tested gave exactly these numbers. See the raw log.