Stop comparing price per million tokens: the hidden LLM API costs

Token price is misleading, token efficiency varies by content type, and OpenAI has the most efficient tokenizer.

Summary:

• Token pricing is misleading: the same input produces 2.65x or more tokens, depending on the model. We got widely varying token counts for identical content across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google's official token-counting APIs.
• Token efficiency varies by content type. Text, JSON, YAML, and tool definitions all tokenize differently. The cheapest provider changes depending on what you're sending. The only way to know what you're actually paying is to measure it.
• OpenAI has the most efficient tokenizer. ON tool-heavy workloads, Claude-opus-4.7 costs 5.3x more than gpt-5.4 despite list prices being 2x apart.

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