How to Compare Model Prices When Each Model Counts Tokens Differently

This story is from 2026-10-25. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

Engineer's view. This is comparing cloud machines by price per vCPU when one provider's vCPU is a full core and the other's is half of one. The unit has the same name and a different size. A token is that kind of unit: every model defines its own. TL;DR. Each model splits text into tokens with its…