What Claude Code costs at API rates: a working method, and why the public per-user statistics are fabricated

As of 2026-08-17: the widely-cited Claude Code cost statistics ("90% of users stay below $30/active day", "$13/developer/active day") do not appear on the pages they are attributed to. I fetched and checked them. Includes a working Python script to compute your own API-equivalent spend from local session logs, with the two parsing details that decide whether the number is right. — Read the full…