TOKENBURN INDEX — TBX · EST. 2026
Every prompt has a burn rate.
AI is cheap until your agents start thinking out loud. TokenBurn Index measures the tokens — and the money — your AI habits quietly torch, then judges you for it.
THE BURNMETER
PASTE · MEASURE · REPENTCount the damage
Paste a prompt, a conversation, an agent workflow. Get estimated tokens, cost across 12 models, and a Token Burn Score from 0 to 100.
Same text, 70x price range
The same request costs $0.001 or $0.16 depending on the model. Most teams never look. You are about to.
Get judged, then optimized
A dry-humored diagnosis, a leaner version of your prompt, and the savings at 1,000 runs. Shame is a feature, not a bug.
AI TOKEN BURN INDEX — 2026
FULL INDEX →Re-pasting the entire conversation "for context"
The model already had the context. Now it has it twice, at input prices.
Agents left on auto-approve overnight
You woke up to 340 tool calls and a refactor nobody asked for.
A 2,000-token system prompt for a yes/no question
The answer was 'no'. The invoice was not.
HALL OF SHAME
ALL CASES →“I used 40,000 tokens to ask for a button color.”
EST. 40,000 TOKENS · $0.42 · The button is still blue.
“My agent rewrote half the repo to rename a variable.”
EST. 1,200,000 TOKENS · $14.70 · The variable is now camelCase. The budget is not.
$AI is cheap until your agents start thinking out loud.
$More tokens. Same result. Beautifully expensive.
$Your AI workflow is not free. It is just quiet.
$Your agent did not work harder. It just spent more.
AI Tokenomics, explained
What tokens actually are, why output costs 4-8x more than input, what cached tokens change, and why agents multiply everything. No hype, no doom — just the meter.