Nick Perry shows how uploading PDFs to Claude wastes tokens: a 20-page document costs 70,000 tokens before you ask anything. A free Microsoft tool on GitHub converts PDFs to Markdown instead, cutting token usage by 70% and improving answers since Claude was trained on Markdown.
Never ever upload another PDF to Claude because Microsoft quietly released the fix months ago and almost nobody is using it. See, every time you drop in a PDF, Claude has to chew through the formatting, the broken tables, and the images before it can even think. Each page burns up to 3,000 tokens, so a 20-page doc eats 70,000 before you ask your first question. The fix is a free tool called Markdown sitting on GitHub with over 110,000 stars. It converts PDFs, Word docs, Excel sheets, even YouTube videos into clean Markdown so your token bill drops by up to 70%. And Claude actually gives sharper answers because it was trained on millions of Markdown files. So next time you paste a PDF, remember what Microsoft already handed you for free.
