pxpipe Cuts Claude Code, Fable 5 Costs Up to 70% by Turning 48,000 Characters Into PNGs
Updated
Updated · THE DECODER · Jul 4
pxpipe Cuts Claude Code, Fable 5 Costs Up to 70% by Turning 48,000 Characters Into PNGs
3 articles · Updated · THE DECODER · Jul 4
Summary
Steven Chong’s open-source pxpipe routes Claude Code prompts through a local proxy that converts bulky text into PNGs, cutting total session token costs by 59% to 70%; one Fable 5 run fell to $6.06 from $42.21.
Anthropic’s image pricing drives the savings: text costs about one token per character, while images are billed by pixel size, letting dense rendered content pack roughly 3.1 characters per image token.
pxpipe targets static prompt material such as system prompts, tool docs and older chat history, while recent messages and model outputs stay as plain text; about 48,000 characters can shrink from roughly 25,000 tokens to 2,700.
Accuracy and speed are the tradeoff: Fable 5 scored 100% on benchmarked math tasks, but Opus 4.7 and 4.8 misread about 7% of rendered images and GPT 5.5 also performed worse, so those models are disabled by default.
The approach is not new—DeepSeek has reported image-based text compression of up to 10x with 97% information retention—but wider adoption could push AI providers to raise image-processing prices.