You've met the cash register (Day 11) and the resend trick (Day 5). Now aim the register at a whole conversation and watch the total roll downhill — then learn the one trick pros use to stop the snowball: summarizing.
Because the whole history is resent each turn, cost grows faster and faster. Set your conversation and watch each turn's bar climb — the later turns are the tall, expensive ones.
💸 Cost per turn:
Tap to push the chat to 40 long turns with no summarizing. Then flip summarizing on and watch the savings.
Your users have 30-turn conversations (40-token messages, 160-token replies). Your budget is $0.30 per full chat. Find a setup that comes in under budget. Hint: one checkbox changes everything.
Real assistants (including coding agents) run for many turns. Here's how they keep the snowball affordable:
Compress old turns into a recap. ✅ Big, simple savings. ⚠️ Fine details fade.
Only keep the last few turns + a summary. ✅ Predictable cost. ⚠️ Can forget older facts.
Reuse the unchanged prefix at a discount. ✅ Cheaper & faster repeats. ⚠️ Needs a stable prefix.
You watched conversation cost grow quadratically — and tamed it with summarization. Now you know why long chats and coding agents can get pricey, and the exact trick pros use to keep the bill down.