Anthropic cost guide: tune effort first, or switch models?

Anthropic 官方指南：控制成本该调 effort 还是换模型

Anthropic's cost guide says to compare models by cost per successful task, and to test effort settings before deciding whether a multi-model tier is cheaper. Switching models mid-conversation can break prompt caching, while changing effort does not. On SWE-bench Pro, running low effort first and rerunning failures at high effort scored 97.0% at $0.17 per task; running high effort throughout scored 95.3% at $0.29.

Why it matters: Anthropic sets single-model low-effort cost per task as the baseline for judging tiered setups, giving routing architectures a concrete cost benchmark.