Developer builds open-source proxy that cut Claude Code token costs by half
A developer discovered that the bulk of Claude Code API costs came not from prompts or responses, but from overhead such as redundant tool schemas and verbose JSON payloads sent with every request. To address this, they built an open-source proxy called Lynkr that strips unnecessary tool definitions, compresses large outputs like grep results, and caches semantically similar queries. The proxy also routes requests by complexity, sending simple questions to free local models and reserving paid cloud APIs only for demanding tasks like architecture reviews or security analysis. In the developer's own sessions, 70–90% of requests were handled locally without hitting a paid backend. The tool is available via npm and works with Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex CLI by overriding the API base URL.
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