🖼️ OmniGlyph — Context as Image

Cut your Claude bill by 59–70% by rendering bulky context as dense PNG pages — the same content, in a fraction of the tokens.

Models bill text per token, but bill an image by its dimensions — not by how much text is inside it.

Part of the OmniRoute family · 🌐 All languages

Eight years of context growth, in characters. Every text line tops out near ~4M chars (a 1M-token window at ~4 chars/token); the orange point is the same Fable 5 1M window read through OmniGlyph images — ~18M chars at the measured 18.16 chars/vision-token, 4.54× the text ceiling. The density and multiplier are measured from a live render at generation time, not hand-typed: regenerate with npx tsx scripts/gen-context-chart.ts (source).

📊 The numbers — measured, not estimated

Model scorecard (can it read dense renders? n=30 per arm, deterministic scoring):

The advantage is Fable-specific today — other vision encoders don't resolve dense glyphs yet. The benchmark harness re-tests any new model in one command.

🤔 Why OmniGlyph?

Every long-running agent session drags the same dead weight on every request: the system prompt, tool docs, and old history — re-billed per token, every turn. OmniGlyph is a local proxy that rewrites those bulky parts into dense PNG pages before they leave your machine:

• Exact billing math, not heuristics — it computes the provider's real image-token formula (measured to residual zero) and converts only when the math wins.
• Fail-closed by design — models that can't read dense renders are blocked by a gate, with benchmark receipts. No silent quality loss.
• Private & local-first — the rewrite happens on 127.0.0.1; nothing extra is sent anywhere.
• Reproducible — every number above has a receipt in benchmarks/*/results/, re-runnable in one command.

⚡ Quick Start

npx omniglyph                                     # proxy on 127.0.0.1:47821
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:47821 claude  # point Claude Code at it

Works both ways:

• API key (pay per token): your bill drops 59–70% end-to-end.
• Subscription session: you don't pay less, but usage limits are counted in tokens — so your limits stretch ~2–3×.

Dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:47821/: tokens saved, every text→image conversion side by side, kill switch, live model chips. Responses stream normally — only the request is compressed, never the model's output.

🔌 Use with Claude clients

Start the proxy in one terminal, then point the client at it.

Claude Code CLI (macOS/Linux):

npx omniglyph
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://127.0.0.1:47821 claude

Claude Code CLI (Windows PowerShell):

npx omniglyph
$env:ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL = "http://127.0.0.1:47821"
claude

Claude Desktop uses the same ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL environment variable for its bundled Claude Code runtime — start omniglyph first, then launch Claude Desktop from an environment where ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL is set to http://127.0.0.1:47821.

🖥️ The dashboard

A full local dashboard ships inside the package — offline, single-file, zero external requests. Six pages, updated live over SSE as requests flow:

• Overview — mission control: savings %, $ saved, latency p95, cache hits, errors, live feed.
• Live Flow — the pipeline as a node graph: client → gate → renderer / passthrough → API, with a particle per real request.
• Telemetry — a token/$ odometer and a live request timeline; click any request to see exactly which parts became images and read the source text behind every page.
• Benchmarks — the harness receipts rendered from benchmarks/*/results/, one row per model·config experiment, and run the benchmarks from the UI: $0 dry-runs stream their output live; live runs stay gated behind your API key plus an explicit cost confirmation.
• Sessions / History — top sessions by tokens saved and every event on disk.