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Equation 12 · Part 15 · The Real Cost of Running Claude in Production, Beyond the Per-Token Price

addition

C=pin(n+τ)+pcww+pcrr+pout(y+z)aC = \frac{p_{\mathrm{in}}(n + \tau) + p_{\mathrm{cw}} w + p_{\mathrm{cr}} r + p_{\mathrm{out}}(y + z)}{a}
addition

What this part means

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

Its job in the formula

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

The passage around this formula

Collect the pieces above into one expression and the gap between a rate card and an invoice becomes explicit. For a single request, let n be new input tokens, w cache-write tokens, r cache-read tokens, y visible output tokens, z billed-but-invisible thinking tokens, and τ\tau the fixed tool and system-prompt tokens added regardless of content. Let pinp_{\mathrm{in}} , pcwp_{\mathrm{cw}} , pcrp_{\mathrm{cr}} , and poutp_{\mathrm{out}} be the published rates, and let a ∈\in (0, 1] be the fraction of attempts an application accepts without needing to reissue the request, because it was neither truncated at the maximum-tokens cap nor lost to a timeout, an overload error, or a rate limit. Cost per accepted…

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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