Browser MCP token cost: Playwright MCP vs Chrome DevTools MCP, and what a snapshot diet saves

Input tokens, API cost and tool-result size for Playwright MCP 0.0.83 and Chrome DevTools MCP 1.11.0 in Claude Code 2.1.295 (Opus 5.5, effort medium) on 7 browser tasks, 94 runs, measured 2026-10-22, with and without the open-source tokensave-mcp-diet proxy (versions 0.1 and 0.2). Everyday tasks (TodoMVC, Wikipedia facts, Hacker News, a Wikipedia table): 90,000 to 224,000 input tokens per task; the largest single tool result in 16 runs was 6,012 characters. One full accessibility snapshot of the English Wikipedia article on Python: about 205,600 Claude tokens (Playwright MCP) and 208,900 (Chrome DevTools MCP). Claude Code refused both as too large; tokensave-mcp-diet 0.2 turns it into a table of contents of about 1,100 tokens. Hacker News snapshot: 18,407 to 6,770 tokens (Playwright) and 14,115 to 8,047 (Chrome DevTools) with the proxy; task API cost 30% and 17% lower (5 runs each). Page with method and limitations: https://tokensave.app/data/browser-mcp-token-cost. Tool: https://github.com/johnisking/tokensave-mcp-diet. Run logs and scripts: https://github.com/johnisking/token-cost-by-language/tree/main/browser-mcp