Token Counter

Check token usage for GPT-4, ChatGPT, and other OpenAI models.

Input Text
Total Tokens
0
Characters
0
Words
0

Token counts vary slightly between models. Defaulting to CL100k base (GPT-4/3.5).

Mastering OpenAI Tokens

What Exactly ARE Tokens?

Tokens are the fundamental units of text that LLMs (Large Language Models) like GPT-4 process. They aren't just words.

  • Common words: Often 1 token (e.g., "apple").
  • Complex words: Split into multiple parts (e.g., "bioinformatics" → "bio", "inform", "atics").
  • Punctuation & Spaces: Each count as tokens or parts of tokens.
Example: The phrase "Hello, world!" is 4 tokens: "Hello", ",", " world", "!".
Why Accuracy Matters

Estimating costs and staying within context limits requires precision. OpenAI's models (GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4) use a specific tokenizer called cl100k_base. Simple word counts are often off by 20-30%.

Rule of Thumb: 1,000 tokens is roughly 750 words of English text.

Pricing & Limits Guide

Cost Estimation

API costs are billed per 1k input/output tokens. Knowing your exact count helps you predict bills before running large batch jobs.

Context Windows

GPT-4-8k has an 8,192 token limit (input + output). If your prompt is 8,000 tokens, the model can only reply with ~190 tokens.

Prompt Engineering

"step-by-step" reasoning adds tokens. Use this counter to optimize your prompts for density and cost-efficiency.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. This tool runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript libraries. Your sensitive prompts and data never leave your device.

We primarily support the cl100k_base encoding used by GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and `text-embedding-ada-002`. We also fallback for older models like text-davinci-003.

Because tokens include spacing, punctuation, and grammar characters. A single complex word might be 2-3 tokens, while a simple "a" or "the" is just 1.

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