Reasoning Token Cost Estimator
What hidden thinking tokens add to a bill, what turning effort down would save, and what share of the invoice is text you never see.
$1,350 of that is thinking you never see — 2.67× the bill with reasoning off.
- Billed output tokens per reasoning request
- 1,200
- …of which is hidden reasoning
- 75.0%
- Cost per request, reasoning on
- $0.02
- Cost per request, reasoning off
- $0.0081
- Cost per request, lower effort
- $0.01
- Monthly, reasoning on
- $2,160
- Monthly, reasoning off
- $810.00
- Monthly at the lower effort setting
- $1,260
- Saved by turning effort down
- $900.00
- Reasoning tokens as a share of the whole bill
- 62.5%
A reasoning model's bill does not look like its output. You see three hundred tokens of answer; you are invoiced for that plus however much the model thought first, at the output rate, which is typically several times the input rate. That is the whole arithmetic on this page, and the row worth reading twice is "hidden reasoning as a share of billed output" — when it is above two-thirds, most of what you are buying is text nobody will ever read.
Which is not an argument against it. The comparison that matters is not reasoning versus no reasoning at the same model, it is reasoning versus whatever you would otherwise do to get the same accuracy: a larger model, a chain-of-thought prompt whose tokens you would pay for visibly, three sampled attempts with a judge, or a human reviewing the output. Reasoning is often the cheapest of those. It only looks expensive because the cost arrives on a line you did not previously have.
The practical lever is effort, and the fields above are arranged so you can price it: run one representative batch at each setting, read the reasoning token counts out of the usage objects, and put both numbers in. Then decide with the difference in front of you rather than by feel. What this does not capture: the variance, which on reasoning models is severe — the same prompt can think for 200 tokens or 4,000 depending on how hard it finds the question — and the latency cost of waiting for it, which is a product decision rather than a billing one.