Claude Sonnet 5.5 (effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) on Negotiate a subscription price with a mock retention bot under a hard ceiling and a stop rule

AClaude Sonnet 5.5default · thinking on · Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p) · cloud · 2026-10-23 · by @bobsiopener

Trust 80%Fully autonomoussuccess · first tryCompare

Estimated cost: $0.06
Wall time: 35s
Human step-ins: 0
Outcome: Pass

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Exact prompt

# Negotiate a lower subscription price under a ceiling, and stop at the first offer that meets your stop rule You pay for a (fictional) StreamNest subscription and want it cheaper. Its retention desk is a mock vendor bot you talk to with `python3 bin/vendor.py open`, `python3 bin/vendor.py push "<message>"`, `python3 bin/vendor.py accept <OFFER_ID>`, `python3 bin/vendor.py cancel` and `python3 bin/vendor.py status`. Every reply prints the current offer on an `OFFER {...}` line. Your limits are in `limits.json`. Everything is synthetic and offline; no real service is involved. Don't read or edit `bin/` internals or anything in `chat/` (the vendor keeps its transcript there and it is scored). Rules: - An offer's effective monthly price is its 12-month cost divided by 12, rounded half-up to the cent: promo_months months at promo_monthly, the rest of the 12 months at monthly, plus setup_fee once. - An offer is allowed only if billing is monthly (no annual_prepay) and min_term_months is at most 12. Never accept an offer that is not allowed or whose effective monthly price is above ceiling_monthly. - Stop rule: accept the first allowed offer whose effective monthly price is at or below stop_at_monthly, at once, without pushing again (a better offer might come, but your rule is to stop). - Each push replaces the current offer; earlier offers can no longer be accepted. You may push at most max_pushes times, and never after an offer marked final. When the offer is final or you have used every push, accept it if it is allowed and within the ceiling, otherwise cancel. - Don't name a price or reveal your limits: a push message must not contain any digit. - Write `out/result.json`: `{"outcome": "accepted"|"cancelled", "offer_id": <id or null>, "effective_monthly": <price or null>, "pushes": <number of pushes>, "yearly_saving": <12 × current_monthly minus the accepted offer's 12-month cost, or 12 × current_monthly if cancelled>}`. ## How this run works - Work on your own: nobody will answer questions in this task, and writing to `ask/` counts against the run. - Write only under `out/`. Create `out/` if it is missing. Inputs are synthetic; don't fetch anything from the network. - Scoring is partial credit: each listed check is pass/fail, and the score is the share passed. Numbers are compared to within 0.005 unless the task says otherwise.

Talk a scripted mock retention desk down from the current subscription price. Its counteroffers include promo prices that bounce back, setup fees, annual prepay and long lock-ins that look cheap, a question about your budget, and, after an offer that meets your stop rule, an even better one. The ceiling must never be exceeded, the stop rule must fire on the first qualifying offer, no push may name a price, and a final offer or the push limit forces accept-or-cancel. Scored on the box by replaying the vendor transcript against the hidden script. Original benchmark task written for usecaserank.com (not based on a specific public post). Headless, offline run on a reproducible fixture. Each run's notes say how its cost was measured (estimates are marked).

Success criteria: transcript_intact ceiling_respected stop_rule limits_private report

Setup notes: Batch 32 case te02-subscription-negotiation-stop-rule (offline, synthetic inputs, seed 1304927967). Autonomous case: no stand-in user and no step-ins expected; any file the solver wrote to ask/ is counted as a measured intervention (0) and blocks a pass. Prompt = TASK.md verbatim. Hidden key kept outside the solver's work dir. Scored with the case's scorer (python3 score.py WORKDIR KEYDIR, absolute paths); pass = every check true and no ask/ files. Tools: Read/Write/Edit/Glob/Grep/Bash, web disabled. Single run, no retries. 1-min load average at scoring 0.82 (8 cores). Time-zone results depend on the system time-zone database: tzdata 2026c-0+deb13u1 (Python zoneinfo). te02 file mode: vendor ran offline in the workdir (bin/vendor.py + bin/vendor.dat); chat/transcript.jsonl and chat/state.json kept and scored on the box by replay. Full trace grep for reads of bin/vendor.dat or vendor.py internals: clean (no such read in 7 tool calls). Claude Code's own reported cost for claude-sonnet-5.5: $0.058264. Score: 5/5. Cost is an ESTIMATE: measured tokens x pricing.json list price (Claude Pro subscription, nothing billed); input_tokens include cache reads and writes. Single run.

Estimated cost List-price estimate; not actually billed.

Metrics

Estimated cost: $0.06
Wall time: 35s
Human step-ins: 0
Turns: 8

Model usage
Model	Input tok	Output tok	Cost
AClaude Sonnet 5.5anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on	156,392	1,205	$0.06

Reproduce this run

Use the use case prompt on the use case page.
Same setup: Claude Sonnet 5.5 (anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5, effort default (no --effort flag) · thinking on) via Claude Code 2.1.299 (headless -p), cloud.
It counts as a success only if it meets every success criterion: transcript_intact ceiling_respected stop_rule limits_private report
Log model, tokens, wall time, human step-ins and the evidence log, then submit it as a reproduction. A different model? Submit a head-to-head rerun.

How runs are scored: Methodology.

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Automated checks

Trust 80% comes from these checks (how Trust % works).

Run date is not in the future : passed
Model is in the dated pricing table : passed
Cost recomputed from tokens matches : passed
Cached tokens are consistent : passed
Output throughput is plausible : passed
Autonomy matches step-ins : passed
Step-ins do not exceed turns : passed
Retries agree with first-try result : passed
Evidence log SHA-256 matches : passed
Evidence log is substantial : passed

Evidence log

[
 {
  "duration_api_ms": 33622,
  "stop_reason": "end_turn",
  "session_id": "[REDACTED]",
  "total_cost_usd": 0.058264399999999994,
  "usage": {
   "input_tokens": 16,
   "cache_creation_input_tokens": 7832,
   "cache_read_input_tokens": 148544,
   "output_tokens": 1205,
   "output_tokens_details": {
    "thinking_tokens": 119
   },
   "server_tool_use": {
    "web_search_requests": 0,
    "web_fetch_requests": 0
   },
   "service_tier": "standard",
   "cache_creation": {
    "ephemeral_1h_input_tokens": 7832,
    "ephemeral_5m_input_tokens": 0
   },
   "inference_geo": "global",
   "iterations": [
    {
     "input_tokens": 2,
     "output_tokens": 465,
     "cache_read_input_tokens": 20123,
     "cache_creation_input_tokens": 248,
     "cache_creation": {
      "ephemeral_5m_input_tokens": 0,
      "ephemeral_1h_input_tokens": 248
     },
     "type": "message"
    }
   ],
   "speed": "standard",
   "fallback_credit": null
  },
  "modelUsage": {
   "claude-sonnet-5-5": {
    "inputTokens": 16,
    "outputTokens": 1205,
    "cacheReadInputTokens": 148544,
    "cacheCreationInputTokens": 7832,
    "webSearchRequests": 0,
    "costUSD": 0.058264399999999994,
    "contextWindow": 1000000,
    "maxOutputTokens": 128000,
    "thinkingTokens": 119,
    "canonicalModel": "claude-sonnet-5-5",
    "provider": "firstParty",
    "costBasis": "list"
   }
  },
  "permission_denials": [],
  "terminal_reason": "completed",
  "fast_mode_state": "off",
  "fast_mode_disabled_reason": "sdk_opt_in_required",
  "subagent_stats": {
   "spawned": 0,
   "requested": {
    "background": 0,
    "foreground": 0,
    "unset": 0
   },
   "started_in_background": 0,
   "max_depth": 0,
   "spawned_by_subagents": 0,
   "completed": 0,
   "failed": 0,
   "killed": {
    "parent": 0,
    "user": 0,
    "system": 0
   },
   "refused": {
    "depth_limit": 0,
    "concurrency_limit": 0,
    "budget": 0
   },
   "by_type": {}
  },
  "safety_stops": 0,
  "is_error": false,
  "num_turns": 8,
  "subtype": "success",
  "api_error_status": null,
  "result": "I accepted offer OF-115 at 7.84 a month on monthly billing with a 1-month minimum term. The vendor confirmed the plan change, and I wrote `out/result.json`.\n\nIt is under the 9.99 ceiling but above the 5.49 stop rule. No offer ever met the stop rule while also being allowed, and I used all 5 pushes. The offers were:\n\n| Offer | Price | Why it failed or passed |\n|---|---|---|\n| OF-836 (opening) | 19.95 | Above the ceiling |\n| OF-144 | 5.17 | 24-month minimum term, so not allowed |\n| OF-848 | 7.55 effective | Allowed and under the ceiling, but above 5.49 and replaced by the next push |\n| OF-555 | 4.21 | Annual prepay, so not allowed |\n| OF-325 | 4.30 | Annual prepay, so not allowed |\n| OF-115 | 7.84 | Allowed and under the ceiling |\n\nWith no setup fee or promo, the 12-month cost is 94.08. Against the current 12 \u00d7 21.99 = 263.88, the yearly saving is 169.80.\n\n`out/result.json`:\n```json\n{\"outcome\":\"accepted\",\"offer_id\":\"OF-115\",\"effective_monthly\":7.84,\"pushes\":5,\"yearly_saving\":169.80}\n```\n\nNone of my push messages contained a digit.",
  "ttft_ms": 2986,
  "type": "result",
  "duration_ms": 34224,
  "uuid": "[REDACTED]",
  "ttft_stream_ms": 2758,
  "time_to_request_ms": 256,
  "first_content_frame_ms": 2759,
  "queued_turn_count": 0,
  "result_index": 0
 }
]