What Claude subscription level and settings should I use to avoid burning through tokens too quickly?

One approach discussed: use the Claude 'team' plan, which includes SOC 2 compliance and requires a minimum of five users. Even a small or solo firm may end up allocated five users' worth of tokens. Heavy token usage often comes from active development work (building apps/skills), which is normal and can be viewed as a cost of doing business, cheaper than hiring additional staff. To reduce token burn: avoid checking 'adaptive thinking' in the model settings, since it can roughly quadruple token usage; it makes responses slightly less sophisticated but often not enough to matter. Default to Sonnet without adaptive thinking for most work. For heavily standardized, repeatable tasks (like a locked-down monthly close skill), it may be worth testing the cheaper Haiku model. If you need more power but want to avoid adaptive thinking's token cost, Opus without adaptive thinking reportedly uses about half the tokens of Sonnet with adaptive thinking turned on.