LLMs Read Images Cheaper: 48K Characters as 2,700 Tokens

A new open-source tool, pxpipe, converts text-heavy context into PNG images before sending to LLMs, slashing token usage by 89%. A Claude Code session costing $42.21 as plain text cost only $4.51 when bulky parts were rendered as images. The trick exploits pricing differences: images are billed by pixels, not characters, enabling dense text packing at ~3.1 characters per image token versus 1 per text token.