What’s the going rate for tokens in terms of dollars? How much are companies spending on “tokens”?

Also kind of ironic that small codebases are now in vogue, just when google monolithic repos were so popular.

> What’s the going rate for tokens in terms of dollars?

It depends on the provider/model, usually pricing is calculated as $/million tokens with input/output tokens having different per token pricing (output tends to be more expensive than input). Some models also charge more per token if the context size is above a threshold. Cached operations may also reduce the price per token.

OpenRouter has a good overview over provider and models, https://openrouter.ai/models

The math on what people are actually paying is hard to evaluate. Ime, most companies rather buy a subscription than give their developers API keys (as it makes spending predictable).

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Towaway69 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Api keys with hard limits I assume?

Are there companies out there that add token counts to ticket “costs”, i.e. are story points being replaced/augmented by token counts?

Or even worse, an exchange rate of story points to tokens used…

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xienze 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Ime, most companies rather buy a subscription than give their developers API keys (as it makes spending predictable).

The downside with subscriptions is that your work with the LLM will grind to a halt for a number of hours if you hit the token limit. I was doing what I consider very trivial work adding Javadoc comments to a few dozen files using Claude Sonnet on the $20 plan and within 30 minutes had been told to sit out for a couple hours. The reason was that Claude was apparently repeatedly sending the files up and down to fill in the comments. In hindsight, sure, that's obvious, but you would think that Claude would be smart enough to do some sort of summarization to make things more efficient. Looking into it, it was on the order of several million tokens in a very short amount of time.

It really made me wonder how in the hell people are using Claude to do "real" work, but I've heard of people having multiple $200/month subscriptions, so I guess that could work. Definitely seems like a glimpse into the future of what these services will truly cost once people are hooked on them.

	▲	Towaway69 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I know of a corporate who has embraced Claude for doing documentation of their codebase to better use Claude to do coding on the codebase. So Claude can understand the codebase, it needs to document it. Makes sense and is also great for humans because now there is uptodate docu on the codebase. I don’t know how much it cost but the codebase, I’m told, is around 2 to 3 million lines of code.