Cline has famously huge API token costs as it is profligate with context. Because codemcp plugs into Claude Desktop you only pay for your Claude Pro sub, similar to Cursor's pricing model

This is true and is essentially a form of arbitrage. Anthropic is eating the cost of your elevated queries with their $20 flat fee subscription.

The "famously huge API token costs" you are referring to is Cline passing the Anthropic API cost through to you with no markup. You even input your own API token.

We do, but I am transitioning towards MCPs. One thing is that it is free, and secondly, Cline don't bring that much more to the table - in Claude desktop I can also ask to implement something, and then tell it to write solution to the source code files. This in effect does the same thing as Cline, but I feel I have bit more control.

Cline also requires the use of an API key, preferably from Anthropic. I found its results to be much better than running a DeepSeek-Llama 70b locally.

Cline is great in terms of VS Code integration but was costing me about $5 an hour in API tokens working on a small two page next.js webapp.