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Show HN: Send Claude Code tasks to the Batch API at 50% off
Hey HN. I built this because my Anthropic API bills were getting out of hand (spoiler: they remain high even with this, batch is not a magic bullet).
I use Claude Code daily for software design and infra work (terraform, code reviews, docs). Many Terminal tabs, many questions. I realised some questions are ok to wait on and with that comes some cost savings. So here is a small MCP that lets you send work directly to Anthropic's Batch API from inside Claude Code, for the same quality responses just 50% cheaper, results come back in ~30min-1hr.
How it works: you type /batch review this codebase for security issues, Claude gathers all the context, builds a self-contained prompt, ships it to the Batch API via an MCP server, and you get notified in the status bar when it's done (optional).
The README has installation instructions, which were mainly generated by claude. I removed the curl | bash setup and at this stage of the project i feel more confident sharing the manual setup instructions.
My main hope with this project is to monetize it. Not by asking for money, rather I am hoping others have ideas or improvements to add and use those to save more on cost.
TIL there's a batch API.. This seems like something a lot of AFK coders should be using.
The pattern for those users is typically they would set some kind of token budget, but their agent would still try to burn through those tokens as quickly as possible, rather than a more sensible "do this at your own leisure over the next ~8 hours".
Looking forward to further commodification of LLM usage in the future to make it more affordable. Batch APIs and more freedom over scheduling/priorities/deadlines seems like the more sustainable approach to driving costs down.