AI Token Counter
Paste your text, see token counts and API costs for every major AI model. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere.
| Provider | Model | Tokens | Cost |
|---|
Token counts are estimates based on average character-per-token ratios. Actual counts may vary by ±10%. Pricing updated September 17, 2026. Prices are sourced from each provider's official documentation when available; otherwise from the public OpenRouter model list. Always verify against your provider's pricing page before committing to spend.
What Are AI Tokens?
Tokens are the fundamental units that AI language models use to process text. A token can be a whole word, part of a word, or even a single character. For English text, one token is roughly 4 characters or about ¾ of a word.
Why Token Counts Matter
- API costs — AI providers charge per token. Knowing your token count lets you estimate costs before making API calls.
- Context limits — Every model has a maximum context window. GPT-4o supports 128K tokens, Claude supports up to 200K, and Gemini up to 2M. Your input must fit within these limits.
- Prompt optimization — Shorter prompts cost less and often perform better. Counting tokens helps you trim unnecessary text.
- Budget planning — If you're building an AI-powered app, accurate token estimation helps forecast monthly API spend.
How Tokenization Works
Each AI provider uses a different tokenizer — an algorithm that splits text into tokens. OpenAI uses tiktoken (with encodings like cl100k_base and o200k_base), while Anthropic and Google use their own proprietary tokenizers. The differences are small for English text but can vary more for code, non-Latin scripts, or structured data.
Token Estimation Accuracy
This tool uses calibrated character-per-token ratios for each provider. For typical English text, estimates are within ±10% of actual counts. For code or non-Latin languages, variance may be higher. For exact counts, use the provider's official tokenizer or API.
Tips for Reducing Token Usage
- Remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, and formatting from prompts.
- Use concise instructions — say "Summarize in 3 bullets" not "Please provide a summary of the text in bullet point format."
- For code tasks, include only the relevant functions, not the entire file.
- Use system prompts efficiently — they're sent with every request in a conversation.