Roland Garros, 2022.
Zheng Qinwen, 19 years old at the time, just took a set from Iga Swiatek. The world number one.
One more set. But then her period came.
She called a medical timeout. Her trainer immediately wrapped her leg, but her leg was fine. It was her stomach. The cramps were so bad she could not play her own tennis anymore.
Yes, those very cramps. The menstrual cramps every woman recognizes too well.
She lost the match.
At her post match interview, she explained:
"The first day is always so tough. I have to do sport and I always have so much pain on the first day. I couldn't go against my nature. I wish I can be a man on court, but I cannot."
Then she added the three words,
"It's just girls' things, you know."
That was 2022. It has stuck with me since.
I have never played at Roland Garros, of course. My tennis is an amateur game. My biggest trophy is my father-in-law saying "Mantap, te! Finally, you hit the ball." over my clumsy backhand.
But I know Zheng’s words deeply.
Photo by Renith R on Unsplash
The day I killed my friendship
In college, I had a friend. I liked her very much because she was witty and smart. One day she invited me to a discussion about our field project. A friendly, before lunch discussion. Nothing offensive at all.
Small problem: I was PMS-ing.
So in the heat of a small argument, instead of being a civilized woman saying "can we revisit this tomorrow morning, over a coffee perhaps?", nope, I called her "anjing lu".
For my non Indonesian readers: it means "you dog". Sounds not-so-bad in English. But in my culture, when it comes from a girl's mouth, it is a big cultural disaster. Women here are raised to be soft spoken, and well mannered. We often find ourselves apologizing too many times for mistakes we did not even make.
And yep, we never really talked again. She cut me off before I could say sorry.
Honestly? I am not blaming her.
Painfully honest? I would be mad if she didn't cut me off. I know I was way out of line that day.
And here is the part that hurts the most. Even now, when I recall that memory, I have completely forgotten why I called her that. I forgot the whole conversation or even the project. What I remember vividly is the emotion. How badly I wanted to spit that curse word.
Is this real or am I making excuses?
I have PCOS, stands for Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.
If you have never heard of it, bless you, your hormones behave. Mine run a 24 hour circus.
Here is the fucked-up part. Science cannot tell me yet why I have it. It is not my diet nor simply my mother's genetics. A Dutch twin study found that PCOS is about 70% inherited, but the genes they have discovered so far only explain around 10% of it.
So, in simple words, researchers know the answer is written somewhere in my body, they are just stuck. At this point, I only hope they did not stop digging.
No, I am not saying every mood swinger woman has PCOS. But for sure, every woman has a hormone cycle. That part is undeniable.
But, mine is just… so freaking loud.
How loud? In one Danish study, 65% of women with PCOS reported mood swings, and two out of three had anxiety. And it is not in our heads. One likely reason is boring and very real: too much male hormones quietly mess with the brain chemicals that control mood.
So where a normal cycle makes a woman cry at a Thailand insurance advertisement, mine makes me end a dear friendship before lunch. Same old song that you have probably heard over and over, just at the loudest volume.
So, yeah. Flash news, it is not drama. It is what it is.
Now, Tennis
Yes, tennis. Trust me on this.
I watch Grand Slams from my sofa. One night it hit me.
Have you ever wondered why tennis-muggle can easily name Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic, but not a single women's player?
Serena Williams? Sure. But have you heard of Jabeur, Swiatek, Sakkari, Kostyuk, Raducanu, Osaka, or Sabalenka?
Men's tennis has the same champions for twenty years. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic. Now Alcaraz and Sinner, trading finals like two kids passing one trophy back and forth. They even joke about it. I am not making that up.
Women's tennis? From my sofa, it looks completely different.
Wimbledon just crowned its ninth first time champion in a row. Nine years, nine different names.
Osaka won big, then disappeared. Raducanu won once, never came back. Swiatek dominates, then loses to someone you have never heard of.
Experts and amateurs alike blame the depth of the field. The pressure. The coaching changes. The "why-women-have-slower-response-time" theory. Sure, sure. Name it all.
But there is one variable nobody even mentions: these athletes play a brutal sport while riding a hormone cycle that hits strength, sleep, and mood every single month.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying.
I am not saying women are too hormonal to win consistently. That is the lazy, sexist take I grew up hearing, and it is complete bullshit.
I am saying the opposite: they perform at the highest level on earth while carrying something the men's tour never has to think about, and nobody even counts it. It is not an excuse for losing. It is an invisible tax every woman pays, every month, quietly.
Aryna, I feel you
Aryna Sabalenka. Four Grand Slam titles. Even Serena Williams' coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, calls her tennis probably the best on tour. Have you watched how she plays? Her serve once hit 133 mph, or 214 km per hour. The second fastest serve ever recorded in women's tennis. Even my car can't go that fast.
And yet. All four titles on hard courts. Roland Garros and Wimbledon: zero. She keeps reaching Grand Slam finals and losing them, four runner up finishes in recent years. And this year at the French Open, in the quarterfinal against Diana Shnaider, she won the first set, went up 4-1, and was two points from winning while serving for the match at 5-4. Then she lost 12 of the last 13 games.
After that match, a reporter asked about her thoughts and emotions. She answered:
"No thoughts, no emotions. Just want to quit tennis right now."
And later:
"I just am so tired of me losing some matches not in the best way just because I was overemotional."
Drama? Don't think so. She has said it more than once.
And this is not new for her. Back in 2022, she cried on court because she suddenly could not serve. Hundreds of double faults in one season, over a serve motion she had done a million times.
Now, do I know if Sabalenka has PCOS? Definitely not. I am not her doctor. I am a random Indonesian woman watching her game from my sofa, snacking low calorie chips, watching my sugar intake, feeling personally attacked.
But she sure has a cycle. Every woman on that tour does. And mine, the loud version, gave me years of private lessons on what it looks like when your own body votes against you in the middle of something important.
So when I watch her cry on court over a failed serve in 2022, I do not think "weak", "shame", or "failure".
I think "oh, I feel you, girl. That's our thing. Girls' thing."
Photo by Keith Allison on Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0
Why I only play tennis with people who know me
I play tennis too. But with one strict rule: only with my husband and my in laws. People who have seen the worst tennis version of me and, for some reason, stayed. Or maybe they just choose not to judge me. Either way, that is why I respect them.
Frankly, my tennis spills my mood.
Good hormone day: in my head, I am Sabalenka. Once I've ruined my racket trying to imitate her serve. Bad hormone day: I can miss a ball that is not even moving.
Once I tested myself and joined a session on Reclub, an app for finding people to play sports with, basically Tinder but for active human beings. I sucked so badly, one guy taught me how to grip the racket. Forgodsake, I have played tennis for years. I know what continental grip is.
The only difference between me and Sabalenka is scale. When she cries and collapses, the whole world writes about her mental state.
When I miss lots of balls and get mad at my racket, only my husband knows. And after years of marriage, he has learned the most important skill in understanding a woman at her hormonal peak: saying nothing and passing the cold water.
The point
No. This is not a free pass to call your best friend anjing (Hell, no). There is no hormone level that makes that acceptable. I still owe her an apology. If she is reading this: I am sorry, and you were right about the project. Probably. I honestly do not remember the project.
The point is simpler. Women are hormonal. Yes. It is hormones, not character.
And painfully honest? We cannot fully control it. I have tried. The hormones won, no matter how hard I tried to reverse it. Most days, I end up trying to reduce my interaction with the world.
So please, do not define who a woman is based on who she was when her hormones were driving. She was still the driver. She just had something screaming in the passenger seat, so loud she went numb and could not think straight. Hormones explain the crash, but after the crash, we don't forget who was behind the wheel.
Zheng called it “just girls’ things”.
She was being polite. It is that invisible tax I told you about. Paid every month, by half of this planet’s population. No medical timeout is long enough to cover it, and nobody gets a trophy for surviving it.
The least woman can do is admit it is on the court.
And not being judged by it.
Every time you run the deep research feature on Claude, there's a real computational cost behind it. Tokens get processed, the model "thinks" through extended reasoning, web searches run, and a long answer gets assembled. That cost is invisible to the individual user because it's wrapped into one flat price, which is a monthly subscription. But once we try to translate that into an actual dollar figure, the picture gets interesting and that’s what this article digs into.
Foto oleh Google DeepMind di Unsplash
This piece tries to answer two questions: what does one deep research session actually cost when converted to API pricing, and what happens to that value when the resulting research is shared publicly instead of kept to yourself.
What Claude.ai Subscriptions Cost Right Now
Before getting into the math, it helps to align on the baseline pricing. Claude Pro is $20/month, and includes access to the latest models, extended reasoning, and MCP connectors. For users who need more headroom, there are two Max tiers: Max 5× at $100/month and Max 20× at $200/month, offering five and twenty times Pro's usage allowance respectively.
Outside of subscriptions, there's also the Claude API, billed per token. That's the yardstick we'll use to translate one research session into a concrete dollar figure.
Pricing Out a Single Deep Research Session
A deep research session isn't a single back-and-forth exchange. Several components contribute to the token count:
Component
Estimated Tokens
Notes
Initial input (prompt + context)
~10,000
Question and instructions
Web search & fetch
~20,000
Articles retrieved and processed by the model
Extended thinking
~30,000
Internal reasoning before answering
Final output
~5,000
Roughly 3,500–4,000 words of research output
Total
~65,000 tokens
For an Opus-class model, API pricing runs $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. Based on the assumptions above, the rough math is:
Input (including web search and thinking): 60,000 tokens × $15/million ≈ $0.90
Output: 5,000 tokens × $75/million ≈ $0.375
Total per session: roughly $1.27
This is obviously an estimate and it could be lower with a Sonnet-class model, or higher for a much longer and more complex research task. But as a rough benchmark, one reasonably thorough deep research session is worth a little over a dollar if paid for directly through the API.
How Many Sessions Does One Subscription Actually Buy?
The next question: out of the $20/month paid for Pro, how many deep research sessions does that actually translate to?
This is a bit messy because Claude doesn't meter usage per message, it meters by computational load. A short conversation can consume a much smaller share of quota than a single deep research session involving many tool calls and long reasoning chains. The difference can run 10–20x. With a conservative assumption, an active Pro user running this feature regularly might get somewhere around 15–20 deep research sessions per month before hitting the limit.
Mapped to API-equivalent value:
Plan
Price/month
Est. Sessions/month
Equivalent API value
Difference
Pro
$20
~15–20
~$19–25
roughly break-even
Max 5×
$100
~75–100
~$95–127
modest savings
Max 20×
$200
~300–400
~$380–500
meaningful savings
The takeaway so far: from a pure compute-cost standpoint, the Pro subscription is roughly break-even against API pricing. The real value of subscribing isn't dollar savings, it's convenience: no API billing to manage, no token limits to track, no infrastructure to maintain.
The Turning Point: What Happens When Research Gets Shared
This is where the math gets more interesting. Up to this point, a single deep research session worth roughly $1.27 in compute cost. Typically stops with one person: whoever ran it. The output sits in a chat history, maybe gets copied into personal notes, and that's it.
Now picture a different scenario: that research gets published as a public article. Someone else who needs similar information no longer has to run the research from scratch, they just read it.
Run the numbers with conservative assumptions:
One Pro user runs 15 research sessions per month ($20)
Every result gets published as an article
Each article is read by an average of 500 people (a reasonable figure for a niche article shared within a community or on social media)
Without that article, some share of those 500 readers would likely have sought the same information another way — including running their own AI research
If all 500 of those readers had to run equivalent research independently through the API, the total cost would be 500 × $1.27 ≈ $635 per article.
Multiplied across 15 articles a month:
Metric
Value
Subscription cost
$20/month
Articles published
15/month
Readers per article (estimate)
500 people
Compute value per research session
$1.27
Total potential value saved for the community
~$9,525/month
Ratio vs. subscription cost
~476×
That 476× figure is obviously not a precise calculation, it depends entirely on assumptions about reader count and how relevant the research is to them. But the underlying direction holds: the value of one research session doesn't disappear after the first person reads it. Once published, the same value can be reused by different people, with no additional compute cost for each subsequent reader.
Why This Matters
There's a real access gap in how AI gets used today. Not everyone can afford a $20/month subscription, let alone $100–200 for a Max tier. Not everyone has the time or the skill to write a good research prompt either. But once one person has done that research well and shared it openly, others without the same access can still benefit from it for free, without needing to understand how the AI works at all.
This isn't a new argument. Libraries, open-access journals, and Wikipedia all run on the same logic. But with AI capable of producing deep research in minutes, the scale and speed at which knowledge could be distributed this way is potentially much larger than before. Provided there's a channel that makes "research on AI, then publish publicly" as frictionless as possible.
How to Actually Share It: The Frasa Connector
All of this math is interesting in theory, but it only matters if sharing research is actually easy. If publishing a deep research session requires copy-pasting into a separate publishing tool, reformatting, and manually posting it somewhere, most people simply won't bother and the 476x multiplier stays theoretical.
This is the gap the Frasa connector for Claude.ai is built to close. Frasa is a custom MCP (Model Context Protocol) connector that lets Claude publish directly to Frasa.io. Turning a finished research session into a public article without leaving the chat.
Setup takes three steps:
Open Custom Connectors in claude.ai settings
Enter the Frasa MCP server (api.frasa.io/mcp)
Connect — done. Claude can now publish to Frasa on request
Once connected, the workflow looks like this:
Run deep research in Claude → ask Claude to publish it via Frasa → it's live as a public article on Frasa.io
With the connector, there are no extra steps. You don't copy, reformat, or repost anything. The gap between "I just learned something useful" and "other people can now read it" basically disappears.
The connector doesn't change the math from before. It just makes that math real. The 476x multiplier only happens if sharing is as easy as the research itself, and this is what makes it that easy.
So the earlier numbers come down to one simple point. The question was never whether research is worth sharing, because it clearly is. The hard part was always the effort it took to share it. When you drop that effort close to zero, sharing stops being a rare one-time thing and becomes a normal habit for thousands of people.
wibowo•Jun 20, 2026But you're the part I couldn’t ignore.
I like reading; letting myself sink into a collection of words woven into a story that makes me forget, for a moment, the weight of the world.
Daydreaming… oh, it’s the most delightful thing. It feels like exploring different lives and situations without having to experience them yourself.
Have you ever fallen in love with a story? Because it’s so beautiful, woven together with each character's many stories. The main character becomes a moving point of view, guiding you through corridors filled with each character’s arc.
The kind of character that makes you smile when you remember the scene where they blush upon meeting their crush for the first time… or makes you cry when you think of the moment they struggle to face their trauma.
You find yourself wishing you could hold onto the thread that connects your character to their world; just to keep them alive.
Or did you ever feel anger when another character barges in and messes everything up for the main character, leaving you spiraling into wild thoughts like, “Is this going to end badly?”
That’s when I saw him.
You, yes you.
You appeared out of nowhere amid the crowd of passing characters, suddenly stepping into the spotlight; even if only for a moment, it was enough to capture my attention.
You’re one of the characters who has always stayed from the start. But you’re not the main character, only have a single arc in the entire story. People who read it might easily overlook you.
But I didn’t.
You’re kind, always trying your best. To me, you matter just as much as the one at the center, because your role holds them up.
I know it’s because I read your arc slowly and patiently, watching your struggles; how you became who you are. The person you are now compared to who you used to be… something many people overlook, just because you’re not the main character.
But hey, I like your smile… those plump cheeks when you smile.
You never hesitate to remind the main character, or anyone in that fictional world, that they’ve already done their best.
"You don’t have to be the best. You don’t have to be perfect. Just be within your own capacity… because humans have their limits, don’t they?"
Small changes: from someone who used to be afraid of everything to someone who stands up for a friend, even if it means getting hurt first.
Feeling the cold floor beneath you, the sting of every blow. Even with blood running from your nose, you don’t step back. You keep going, even when your body feels like it might give out.
Baby steps, yet you grow within the story. How could I ever ignore you, hm? When you shine that brightly.
I'm merely a distant observer, savoring your story that feels more exclusive as everyone else fixates on the main character.
And I love it. I love the version of myself who admires you from afar.
Thank you for the parts of your story you thought didn’t matter at all.
Maybe it seems small; your efforts and all the stories you carry. But to someone else, it means the world.
If, in the end, your story doesn’t end well, then let me write it again; a story where we finally meet.
I may not be the best writer, but I’ll never run out of words to describe you when people ask me, or even when they simply stop by our story.
Maybe it isn’t just a story.
Maybe people like you exist beyond the pages, too.
Who knows?
foreshadoffe•Apr 19, 2026 
