1.15 Billion Token Spend Yields Practical Tokenization Cost Lessons

After processing 1.15B input tokens, the author shares that JSON formatting is token-inefficient, non-English text tokenizes at worse ratios than English, and the 1 token ≈ 4 characters rule of thumb breaks down in practice. Concrete takeaways include using the Claude tokenizer to audit prompts and avoiding verbose structured formats where possible.