Free AI Token Counter
Paste text to estimate how many tokens it may use before sending it to an AI model or API.
Counted entirely in your browser using a GPT-compatible tokenizer. Other model families may tokenize slightly differently.
Token Counter matters because AI API pricing and context-window limits are measured in tokens, not characters or words — and different models tokenize the same text differently.
What is a token, and how is it actually different from a word?
A token is a chunk of text — often a whole word, part of a word, or a punctuation mark — that an AI model processes as a single unit; most models are priced and limited by token count, not word or character count. On average, English text runs about 0.75 words per token, though it varies: common short words are often a single token, while longer or less common words can split into two or more, which is exactly why tokenizers split text into these subword pieces instead of counting whole words the way this tool's name might suggest.
How does this counter actually work, and is it accurate for every AI model?
Paste your text into the box and the count updates instantly using a GPT-compatible tokenizer, running entirely in your browser. Different model families — GPT, Claude, Gemini and others — each use their own tokenizer, so the same text can produce a slightly different token count depending on which model you're actually targeting; this tool's GPT-compatible count is a close estimate, but the exact number for Claude or Gemini specifically may differ a bit.
Why does token count actually matter, and what's a context window?
Most AI APIs charge by token and cap how many tokens fit into a single request — that cap is called the context window, and it includes both your input and the model's output combined. Knowing your token count in advance helps avoid unexpected costs on a paid API or a request that gets truncated or rejected for exceeding the limit; once you have a token count, plug it into the AI Cost Calculator alongside your chosen model to estimate the actual price.
Does this tool send your text anywhere, and how do you reduce a high token count?
No — tokenization happens entirely in your browser using a local tokenizer library, so your text is never uploaded or sent to a server. To reduce token count, remove unnecessary words, redundant context and repeated instructions; the AI Prompt Shortener can help condense a long prompt automatically while keeping its meaning intact.
Why do AI models split text into these odd little chunks instead of just counting words?
Because the technique long predates AI language models entirely — it started as a data compression trick. Programmer Philip Gage published the original Byte Pair Encoding algorithm in a 1994 issue of The C Users Journal, describing a simple way to shrink a file by repeatedly replacing its most common pair of adjacent bytes with a single unused byte. It sat as a compression footnote for two decades until 2015, when researchers Rico Sennrich, Barry Haddow and Alexandra Birch repurposed the same core idea for an entirely different problem: breaking rare and unfamiliar words down into smaller, more common subword pieces so machine translation models could handle vocabulary they'd never seen whole. That repurposed technique is essentially what every modern tokenizer, including the one running this counter, still does today — quietly borrowing a 1994 file-compression algorithm to decide what counts as one "token" of text.
Is Token Counter free to use?
Yes. Token Counter is completely free, with no sign-up and no usage limits.
Do I need to install any software?
No. Token Counter runs directly in your web browser — nothing to download or install.
Is my data kept private?
Everything happens on your device. We never receive or store the file or text you enter into Token Counter.