Claude Opus 4.7 Token Bloat: 10-35% Higher Token Consumption at Same Price — Up to 40% Effective Cost Increase

DEV Community·medium signal

Anonymous token comparisons on HN and detailed analysis reveal Opus 4.7's new tokenizer uses 1.08x-1.46x more tokens than 4.6 depending on content type (worst on code and structured data). Combined with slightly longer default responses and more thorough reasoning traces, practical costs can increase ~40% despite unchanged rate cards ($5/$25 per million tokens). For builders: if you're on Opus 4.7, audit your token consumption against 4.6 baselines. Consider staying on 4.6 for cost-sensitive workloads or implementing explicit token budgets in system prompts.