Token Economics

Know what AI tokens buy you.

Token economics is the market and operating system around AI tokens: how compute is priced into tokens, how organizations allocate them, how agents consume them, and how that spend is measured against outcomes.

The Efficient Token Tree

Current viewWasteful tree

RootYour token bill

Select a branch to inspect its paired failures and practices.

Branch

Context

3 paired nodes

Failure mode

Raw pages into context.

A web fetch returns the whole page when the agent asked for one fact; raw HTML can be tens of thousands of tokens per page.

Failure mode

Full tool-output dumps.

Ten thousand rows enter context when five were needed.

Failure mode

Every tool schema, every turn.

Classic MCP re-sends the full tool catalog each turn whether or not it's used.

The numbers behind the tree

~66x

input-token spread, same model, leaner harness scored higher

Terminal-Bench, 2026 ↗4.7x

Claude Code ~32,800 vs OpenCode ~6,900 scaffolding tokens

Systima, 2026 ↗≈80%

of a real provider bill came from cache traffic

arXiv:2607.12161, July 2026 ↗−38% / +6.8%

tool-output tokens removed, cost increased after the cached prefix broke

arXiv:2607.12161, July 2026 ↗≈0.1x

base input price for cache reads on both major providers

Anthropic and OpenAI pricing, 2026-08 ↗≈2x

bill after a Codex CLI compaction retune

Codex CLI v0.118 regression, 2026 ↗$1,434/day

consumed by a documented retry storm

arXiv:2604.16646, 2026 ↗$1,500/mo

per-tool cap at Uber after about four months of budget burn

TechCrunch, 2026 ↗+7.6%

cost at low effort in an A/B test of a plugin claiming 60–90% cuts

JetBrains, July 2026 ↗

The field guide keeps growing.

>200entries

Tools
Research
Practices
Concepts
Copy-paste setups

GitHub preview for QuesmaOrg awesome-ai-tokenomics

Browse practices ↗

Read the bill from the inside

Claude Code pricing: same tokens, same model, up to 40x the price

Claude Code buyer’s guide, August 2026: what Max, Team, and Enterprise cost, how to get the best deal, and how Uber and Shopify cap the spend.

I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens

How I burned a full Claude limit in 30 minutes and built my own deep research pipeline instead: 3 subscriptions, shared memory, a clear role for each model. You can build the same from what you already pay for.

Baba Is Solved by Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, but at what cost?

We ported the puzzle game Baba Is You to the Harbor framework, and benchmarked current models, including Claude, GPT, Gemini, GLM, and DeepSeek. A human Twitch streamer is 4x faster than Claude Fable 5.