Engineering

Why Curated Context Beats Raw Data for Coding Agents

Across four scenarios, Claude Code produced ~40% better results at ~33% lower cost with Frugal than with general-purpose MCP servers, roughly twice the cost-efficiency. Recently I...

Craig Conboy By Craig Conboy June 7, 2026
Why Curated Context Beats Raw Data for Coding Agents Featured article
Filter posts
Cost Engineering
Anthropic
OpenAI
Featured
AI
6 Types of Tools That Identify and Profile Expensive AI API Calls in Your Application Code
Cost Engineering
Anthropic
OpenAI
Featured
AI
6 Types of Tools That Identify and Profile Expensive AI API Calls in Your Application Code
Most dev teams aren't sure which code is driving their AI API spend. That's not a criticism, it's just the reality of how token-based billing works....
Ishan Kamat
Company
Featured
Press Release
Frugal Raises US $5M Seed to Bring Cost Engineering to Cloud and AI Applications
Company
Featured
Press Release
Frugal Raises US $5M Seed to Bring Cost Engineering to Cloud and AI Applications
The world’s first Application Cost Engineering platform curbs inflating costs associated with AI and cloud services at the source code - without...
Mike Weider
Engineering
AI
FinOps
Why Curated Context Beats Raw Data for Coding Agents
Engineering
AI
FinOps
Why Curated Context Beats Raw Data for Coding Agents
Across four scenarios, Claude Code produced ~40% better results at ~33% lower cost with Frugal than with general-purpose MCP servers, roughly twice...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
AI
FinOps
Best Cloud Cost Tools for Code-Level Attribution
Cost Engineering
AI
FinOps
Best Cloud Cost Tools for Code-Level Attribution
Most organizations have a solid handle on where their cloud spend goes at the infrastructure level. They know which services are expensive, which...
Ishan Kamat
Engineering
FinOps
Why Not Just Optimize Everything?
Engineering
FinOps
Why Not Just Optimize Everything?
Maybe you've heard that "coding is solved". Its true, I can now generate, on a whim, whatever code my heart may desire. Does it change the game for...
Craig Conboy
Anthropic
AI
FinOps
Frugal Meets the Claude Advisor
Anthropic
AI
FinOps
Frugal Meets the Claude Advisor
Anthropic's new advisor tool cuts the cost of agentic Claude workloads, and we are all about that, so Frugal now supports it out of the box. Here's...
Craig Conboy
AI
FinOps
When Inference Capacity Gets Tight, Efficiency Becomes Advantage
AI
FinOps
When Inference Capacity Gets Tight, Efficiency Becomes Advantage
Years ago I worked on a system where database utilization was a known problem. We wanted to do efficiency work on it, but over and over again we...
Craig Conboy
FinOps
Why GenAI Breaks Classic SaaS Playbooks
FinOps
Why GenAI Breaks Classic SaaS Playbooks
Everyone's debating whether AI will kill SaaS. They're asking the wrong question. There is a popular narrative out right now that generative AI will...
Mike Weider
Engineering
What Is Application Cost Engineering?
Engineering
What Is Application Cost Engineering?
Application Cost Engineering is the practice of designing, implementing, and operating software systems with cost as an explicit, measurable...
Craig Conboy
Engineering
Scaffolding for AI, the Frugal Way
Engineering
Scaffolding for AI, the Frugal Way
AI agents can analyze code, understand natural language queries, and generate recommendations. But making them reliable enough for production use...
Craig Conboy
FinOps
Why Cloud Cost Optimization Isn't Enough
FinOps
Why Cloud Cost Optimization Isn't Enough
If you're in FinOps, you've probably gotten pretty good at the core playbook to reduce cloud costs: negotiate committed use discounts, right-size...
Mike Weider
Fun
AI
ChatGPT 5.2 vs. Gemini 3 Pro Preview vs. Opus 4.5 -- Mirror Simulator Bakeoff
Fun
AI
ChatGPT 5.2 vs. Gemini 3 Pro Preview vs. Opus 4.5 -- Mirror Simulator Bakeoff
Don't tell my spouse but she is getting some upgrades to her makeup station for Christmas. She has a small area dedicated to makeup and hair. Its a...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
GCP
AWS
Top 10 Cloud Cost Traps We Saw in 2025
Cost Engineering
GCP
AWS
Top 10 Cloud Cost Traps We Saw in 2025
2025 was the year teams stopped just rightsizing infrastructure and started digging into how their applications actually spend. We've seen a lot of...
Craig Conboy
Product
Preview of Frugal Code
Product
Preview of Frugal Code
Frugal Code is our new cost engineering platform that attributes managed service costs to your code, finds inefficient usage, provides Frugal Fixes...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
Datadog
The Frugal Approach to Datadog Log Management Costs
Cost Engineering
Datadog
The Frugal Approach to Datadog Log Management Costs
With usage-billed logging services like Datadog, cost optimization starts with your code. It's not just that applications generate the logs;...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
GCP
The Frugal Approach to GCP Cloud Logging Costs
Cost Engineering
GCP
The Frugal Approach to GCP Cloud Logging Costs
With usage-billed logging services like Google Cloud Logging, cost optimization starts with your code. It's not just that applications generate the...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
AWS
The Frugal Approach to AWS CloudWatch Logs Costs
Cost Engineering
AWS
The Frugal Approach to AWS CloudWatch Logs Costs
With usage-billed logging services like CloudWatch, cost optimization starts with your code. It's not just that applications generate the logs;...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
AWS
The Frugal Approach to AWS S3 Storage Costs
Cost Engineering
AWS
The Frugal Approach to AWS S3 Storage Costs
With usage-billed storage services like S3, cost optimization starts with your code. It's not just that applications store the data; applications...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
GCP
The Frugal Approach to GCS Storage Costs
Cost Engineering
GCP
The Frugal Approach to GCS Storage Costs
With usage-billed storage services like Google Cloud Storage, cost optimization starts with your code. It's not just that applications store the...
Craig Conboy
Cost Engineering
Anthropic
The Frugal Approach to Anthropic Claude API Costs
Cost Engineering
Anthropic
The Frugal Approach to Anthropic Claude API Costs
With usage-billed AI services like Anthropic Claude, cost optimization starts with your code. It's not just that applications generate the API calls;...
Craig Conboy
GET THE LATEST
Subscribe to the Frugal Blog
Get Notified when we post new content
background Image
Robo Image

Take Frugal for a live test drive

Explore how Frugal scans your code and cloud services to find waste, recommend optimizations, and generate ready-to-use fixes in a secure, read-only environment.
background Image
robo image
black block image