Sure, it might cost a few dollars here and there. But what I've personally been getting from it, for that cost, is so far away from "expensive" it's laughable. Not only does it do things I don't want to do, in a super efficient manner. It does things I don't know how to do - contextually, within my own project, such that when it's done I do know how to do it.
Like others have said - if you're exhausting the context window, the problem is you, not the tool.
Example, I have a project where I've been particularly lazy and there's a handful of models that are huge. I know better than to have Claude read those models into context - that would be stupid. Rather - I tell it specifically what I want to do within those models, give it specific method names and tell it not to read the whole file, rather search for and read the area around the method definition.
If you do need it to work with very large files - they probably shouldn't be that large and you're likely better off refactoring those files (with Claude, of course) to abstract out where you can and reduce the line count. Or, if anything, literally just temporarily remove a bunch of code from the huge files that isn't relevant to the task so that when it reads it it doesn't have to pull all of that into context. (ie: Copy/paste the file into a backup location, delete a bunch of unrelated stuff in the working file, do your work with claude then 'merge' the changes to the backup file and copy it back)