Free Token Counter

If you are building anything with large language model APIs - OpenAI, Anthropic, Google - you are paying per token. But most people have no idea how many tokens their prompt or input text actually contains until they get the bill. This tool gives you a quick, reliable estimate before you send a single API call. Tokens are not the same as words. A token is roughly 3-4 characters of English text, and common words like "the" or "is" are usually a single token, while longer or less common words might be split into multiple tokens. Punctuation, special characters, and formatting all count too. This means a 500-word blog post might be anywhere from 600 to 800 tokens depending on the vocabulary used. The token estimate here uses an approximation algorithm that closely matches the behavior of OpenAI cl100k_base tokenizer (used by GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo). It is not a byte-pair encoding implementation - for that you would need tiktoken - but for cost estimation and planning purposes, it gets you within 5-10% of the actual count, which is more than enough for most use cases. We also show estimated API costs across popular models so you can compare pricing before committing to a provider. All processing happens in your browser - your text is never sent anywhere.