🖼️ 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

🇺🇸

🇸🇦

🇦🇿

🇧🇬

🇧🇩

🇨🇿

🇩🇰

🇩🇪

🇪🇸

🇮🇷

🇫🇮

🇫🇷

🇮🇳

🇮🇱

🇮🇳

🇭🇺

🇮🇩

🇮🇹

🇯🇵

🇰🇷

🇮🇳

🇲🇾

🇳🇱

🇳🇴

🇵🇭

🇵🇱

🇵🇹

🇧🇷

🇷🇴

🇷🇺

🇸🇰

🇸🇪

🇰🇪

🇮🇳

🇮🇳

🇹🇭

🇹🇷

🇺🇦

🇵🇰

🇻🇳

🇨🇳

🇹🇼

📊 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.

⚙️ How it works

bulky request block ──► profitability gate ──► reflow + render (1-bit 5×8 atlas)
                       (exact billing math)     ──► 1568×728 PNG pages ──► splice back, cache-friendly

• Billing is computed exactly, before converting: Anthropic bills ⌈w/28⌉ × ⌈h/28⌉ + 4 tokens per image (28 px patches — measured to residual zero). A full page carries 28,080 chars for 1,460 tokens ≈ 19 chars/token, vs ~2 chars/token for dense text. The gate converts only when the math wins.
• What converts: the static system prompt + tool docs, old collapsed history, large tool outputs.
• What never converts: your messages, recent turns, the model's output, sparse prose, byte-exact values (hashes/IDs ride alongside as text), and any model that failed the reading benchmark.

🧭 The honest part

• It is lossy. Byte-exact recall from images is unreliable by nature. Mitigations shipped: exact identifiers travel as text next to the image, and the measured production config produced zero silent confabulations — failed reads abstain.
• Only Fable 5 is approved today, with receipts. GPT-5.5 and Gemini 2.5-flash measurably cannot read dense renders; Opus 4.8 needs 4× bigger glyphs. The gate enforces this.
• We found and avoided a billing trap: the high-resolution image tier bills 3.3× more per page, but the vision encoder doesn't receive the extra resolution — bigger pages read worse. Measured, documented in docs/benchmarks/BENCHMARKS.md, not enabled.
• Prices change; the durable metric is the token cut, which the proxy logs per request against a free count_tokens counterfactual.

🔬 Reproduce every number

pnpm install && pnpm test                                     # full suite
node benchmarks/billing-sweep/run.mjs --dry-run               # billing predictions, $0
pnpm exec tsx benchmarks/density-frontier/run.ts --dry-run    # cost table, $0
# with keys: ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / OPENAI_API_KEY / GEMINI_API_KEY (or --via-cli for a Claude Code subscription)

Full methodology and every result table: docs/benchmarks/BENCHMARKS.md. Raw per-answer receipts: benchmarks/*/results/*.jsonl.

🚀 The OmniRoute family

OmniGlyph also ships as a native compression engine inside OmniRoute — the free AI gateway. There it runs as the omniglyph engine (standalone single mode or stacked with the other engines), with fail-closed gates and image-aware token accounting.

🛠️ Tech Stack

Project layout

📧 Support & Community

• 🐛 Issues — bugs and feature requests
• 🔒 SECURITY.md — vulnerability reports
• 🤝 CONTRIBUTING.md — strict TDD + measurement-before-claims
• 📜 CHANGELOG.md · CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE.