Cut Claude Code & Codex Costs ~50% | Headroom
Cut your Claude Code & Codex token costs by ~50%
Headroom is a menu bar app that quietly optimizes the inputs Claude Code and Codex get by reversibly compressing the bulky tool output, logs, and boilerplate that can devour your token budget. Nothing the model needs is lost: it can pull the original back on demand.
This unlocks about 2x as much usage on the plan you already pay for.
Download for MacOS
7-day free trial · no credit card required
178<br>happy developers
2,681<br>Headroom installs around the world
31.4B<br>tokens saved, and counting
~$283,046<br>in equivalent value at Claude API rates
Used by team members of
Care.com logo
Consensys
Payhawk logo
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drive.com.au
Valon
scalemeup.com
Care.com logo
Consensys
Payhawk logo
with paint0_linear_5019_99065 and paint1_radial_5019_99065 here -->
drive.com.au
Valon
scalemeup.com
Privacy first
Your prompts and code never leave your machine — all optimization runs locally.
Self-contained
Keeps your runtime clean, never interfering with packages your projects depend on.
Fewer tokens, same result
Headroom compresses the noise reversibly, so the model still reaches anything it needs — with no measurable hit to output quality.
The problem
You hit your limit before you finish the work
Claude Code and Codex are the best part of your week — until the usage runs out. Most of what<br>burns through that limit isn't your thinking; it's the noise your tools pump into every prompt.
The week resets, your deadline doesn't
You blow through the weekly limit by Wednesday, then spend the rest of the week rationing prompts or paying more.
You pay full price for noise
Build logs, JSON blobs, and shell output flood the context window. Every wasted token is one you can't spend on real work.
The only fix on offer is "pay more"
Upgrading a tier just raises the ceiling. You send the same bloated prompts and burn through the bigger limit too; pay up again.
How it works
Less noise in, more code out
Headroom runs as a local proxy: it intercepts each prompt before it reaches Claude Code or Codex<br>and reversibly compresses the logs, boilerplate, and repetitive context that bloat it —<br>keeping the original retrievable on demand. You get ~50% fewer tokens with no measurable<br>hit to quality, automatically, on every session.
Your tools
logsHTMLJSONshell
Headroom
~50% saved
Claude Code & Codex
see only what matters
65.7M
tokens saved per developer, on average
Dashboard<br>Optimize<br>Activity<br>Add-ons
Benchmarks
Same results, fewer tokens
These are per-scenario results on the noisiest inputs, where savings run highest. A full<br>session blends these with cheaper turns — the multi-tool agent below (61%) is closest to a<br>realistic end-to-end task, and typical workloads land around ~50% overall. Measured before<br>and after, on real workloads.
Token savings by scenario
Code search (100 results)<br>92% saved
1,408 remaining<br>16,357 tokens saved
SRE incident (debugging)<br>92% saved
5,118 remaining<br>60,576 tokens saved
GitHub issue (triage)<br>73% saved
14,761 remaining<br>39,413 tokens saved
Multi-tool agent (memory leak investigation)<br>61% saved
6,100 remaining<br>9,562 tokens saved
Codebase (exploration)<br>47% saved
41,254 remaining<br>37,248 tokens saved
Headroom powered savings
Tokens sent after optimization
Quality preserved
Fewer tokens doesn't mean fewer answers. Headroom strips noise —<br>not signal. Every benchmark below ran the same task with and without compression,<br>then compared the outputs.
0.919
HTML extraction F1
181 real web pages (Scrapinghub)
4/4
JSON retrieval
needle-in-haystack, 100 prod logs
+0.02 F1
QA accuracy vs. uncompressed baseline
Stripping HTML noise helped the model focus on relevant content — compression<br>improved results on SQuAD v2 / HotpotQA (+2% exact match).
0%
HTML recall
181 real web pages (Scrapinghub)
Same
Multi-tool agent findings
4-tool session, memory leak task — identical conclusions at 61% fewer tokens
Based on data from the open-source Headroom CLI benchmark suite.
ROI Calculator
See what Headroom saves your team
Headroom costs a fraction of your AI subscription and delivers roughly twice the usage.
Pro
Max ×5
Max ×20
Engineers using Claude Code or Codex<br>10
151025501002505001000
$1,000
Monthly AI spend
$100
Headroom cost / mo
Equivalent extra capacity
$1,000/mo
10× return on Headroom spend — based on ~2× token efficiency from Headroom.
Testimonials
Loved by developers
Why switch
The other ways to stretch your usage limit
You have options when the usage runs low. Here is how they stack up against Headroom.
Headroom<br>Do nothing<br>Run /compact by hand<br>Upgrade your tier
More usage per plan<br>~2x<br>None<br>A little<br>More, until you cap again
Extra monthly cost<br>Small flat fee<br>$0<br>$0<br>+$80/mo and up
Keeps output quality<br>Preserved<br>n/a<br>Drops context<br>Unchanged
Effort from you<br>Install once<br>None<br>Every session<br>One...