The 22,000 Token Tax: Why I Killed My MCP Server

I was at a company workshop, arguing with beginners about token costs. They wanted to save money. Reasonable instinct. They were spending maybe €25 a week on API calls and wanted to cut it to €20. I pushed back hard: "You're at the learning stage. Spend more, not less. Explore. Break things. Create costs. Because while you're saving €5, I'm spending €600 a week — and I'll gladly spend €20 more if it means finishing a ticket in one session instead of two." Then I told them the one scenario where token consumption actually matters: when you need to prolong a session. Not to save money — to preserve context. Because when your session compacts or resets, you lose everything the model was holding in its head. And in the early days of Claude Code, there was no auto-compact. Your session just died with an error when you hit the limit. Auto-compact made this better, but you never know what survives the squeeze. Research confirms what I've felt in practice: context length alone hurts LLM perfor