How to Measure and Reduce Your LLM Tokenizer Costs

You're shipping an AI-powered feature, the looks great, and then the invoice arrives. Suddenly that clever summarization endpoint is costing you $400/day because nobody bothered to measure how many tokens you're actually burning. I've been there. Twice. The problem isn't that LLM APIs are expensive - pricing has dropped dramatically. The problem is that most developers have no idea how their text maps to tokens, and that ignorance compounds fast at scale. Why Token Counts Surprise You Tokenizers don't work the way your brain does. You see "authentication" as one word.