AI by Hand ✍️

AI by Hand ✍️

Budget Ceiling

How many calls a budget buys

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

Given a fixed budget, how many calls can you make? Find the cost of one call first, then divide the budget by that cost. The result is the hard ceiling on how much work can be done in a session. For agents running autonomously, this ceiling determines how many steps the agent can take before it must stop.

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

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