Free AI Token Counter — GPT, Claude, Gemini

How token counting works

Each AI model breaks text into tokens — chunks roughly equal to ~4 characters of English (less for code or non-English text). Tokens are how the model bills you, how it limits context, and how it counts "thinking effort."

• 1 token ≈ 4 characters in English (more for code, less for non-Latin scripts)
• 1,000 words ≈ 1,300-1,500 tokens
• A typical prompt is 200-800 tokens; a typical response is 500-2,000 tokens
• The free counter above uses approximate tokenization (within 5-8% of exact count from each provider's tokenizer) — close enough for cost estimation, not for billing reconciliation.

Why count tokens?

1. Cost estimation. API calls cost per 1M tokens (input + output). Knowing your prompt's token count lets you budget batch jobs.
2. Context-window planning. If your prompt is 80% of the context window, you have only 20% left for the response. Detect this before runtime.
3. Prompt-bloat detection. Prompts often grow over time as engineers add edge-case rules. The counter shows when your prompt has bloated past optimal length.
4. Cross-model comparison. The same text uses different token counts in different tokenizers. Useful when porting a prompt from GPT to Claude or vice versa.

Privacy

This tool runs entirely in your browser. The text you paste is processed locally via JavaScript — no upload, no storage, no logs. Closing the tab erases everything.