AI by Hand ✍️

AI by Hand ✍️

Words to Cents

From a word count to a bill

Prof. Tom Yeh's avatar
Prof. Tom Yeh
May 28, 2026
∙ Paid

Library › Token Problems

  1. Tokenization

  2. Subword Tokens

  3. Non-Word Tokens

  4. Token Ratio

  5. Headroom

  6. Token Pricing

  7. Prompt and Completion

  8. The Billing Line

  9. Asymmetric Pricing

  10. Words to Cents

  11. Token Mix

  12. Usage Forecast

  13. Standing Instructions

  14. Fixed Overhead

  15. Budget Ceiling

  16. Token Allowance

  17. Two Speeds

  18. Output Bound

  19. Rate Cards

  20. Usage Audit

How do you price a call when you only know the word count? Estimate input tokens from the words, then price input and output separately. Get the token counts right and the cost follows. In practice, agent prompts arrive as natural language, so word-to-token estimation is the first step in any cost calculation.

Paid members: the worksheet and its printable PDF are below ↓

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