System prompts are part of the software that customers pay to access.
Complaining about that is a bit like complaining that your Netflix subscription includes paying to execute the compiled code that Netflix wrote that serves you video streams from their servers.
Actually there is a difference: If Anthropic deleted a large chunk of that system prompt I guess you might get like a 1% increase in how much Opus 5 you can use via their chat allowance for your paid subscription.
Is that really something worth being frustrated by?
they are the first part of the input and it contains no user dependent variables, so the model is in a known state that it can reuse across all users, it does not need to recompute all that inference
That is never the cost, it's a common misconception.
Cost scales linearly per tokens. Unless you are sending one token at a time and avoiding using the same machine or cache.
Just look at api charges, they are charged by token, not by token squared.