tokenmeter-cli 0.2.0

Count tokens and estimate cost for prompts before you send them.

tokenmeter

Count tokens and estimate cost for prompts before you send them, from the command line or as a CI budget gate.

Prompt templates grow, a few-shot example gets added, a retrieved context balloons, and suddenly every call costs more than you thought. tokenmeter gives you the exact token count and a dollar estimate up front, for a single prompt or a whole directory of templates.

$ tokenmeter count prompts/system.txt --model gpt-4o
input            in tok   out tok   cost (USD)
prompts/system.txt  812         0   $0.002030

$ tokenmeter count prompts/ --model gpt-4o-mini --json

Install

$ pip install tokenmeter-cli                 # from PyPI, once released
$ pip install git+https://github.com/jmweb-org/tokenmeter   # latest, available now

Token counting is exact for the supported OpenAI encodings via tiktoken.

Usage

$ tokenmeter count system.txt -m gpt-4o          # one file
$ tokenmeter count prompts/ -m gpt-4o-mini       # every text file in a directory
$ cat prompt.txt | tokenmeter count - -m gpt-4o  # standard input
$ tokenmeter count p.txt --output-tokens 500     # include an assumed completion
$ tokenmeter models                              # list models and prices

As a budget gate

Fail a build when a prompt set would cost more than you allow:

$ tokenmeter budget prompts/ --model gpt-4o --max-cost 0.05

- run: tokenmeter budget prompts/ --model gpt-4o --max-cost 0.05

Cost model

Counts are real tokens. Cost multiplies tokens by a per-model rate from a small, dated price table (tokenmeter models prints it with its "as of" date). By default only input tokens are counted; pass --output-tokens N to add an assumed completion length to the estimate. Prices change, so treat the dollar figures as estimates and update the table when they move.

Exit codes

Code	Meaning
0	Counted; under budget (or count was used)
1	budget estimate exceeded --max-cost
2	An input was missing, or the model is unknown

License

MIT. See LICENSE.