Cheaper than Claude, without the asterisk

We say Casra is cheaper than Claude and we mean it literally, per token, on every tier. No credits-that-aren't-dollars, no "up to," no asterisk.

The shape of a coding task

A real agentic task is not one big call. It's twenty-odd calls that re-send the same repo context each time. The dominant cost lever isn't the headline token price — it's whether that repeated context hits a cache.

Casra orders every prompt so the stable part (your repo, the system prompt) comes first. The provider's prefix cache hits, and the resent context costs a fraction of a cent instead of full freight.

The numbers

For a reference task — about 25 calls, 400K cumulative input at 75% cache hits, 10K output:

• On a frontier model, you're looking at roughly $0.54–$0.90.
• The same task on Casra lands around $0.02–$0.05 in raw cost.

We price with a healthy margin and still come out far under Sonnet on every public line item. The savings are provable on the bill, which is the only place they count.

Why we can hold the line

Credits are prepaid and metered before each call, with a hard price floor in code: we never sell below cost, and a margin monitor trips if economics drift. That discipline is what lets us keep prices low without the usual quiet clawbacks.