The hidden iceberg: a 10-token question costs 14,800 tokens
User types 10 tokens. System prompt, few-shot examples, conversation history, RAG chunks, and tool definitions silently bring the total to 14,300 input tokens. This is the bill no one sees.
Input
14,300 tokens
Output
500 tokens
Cached
60%
Calls / mo
50,000
What's inside the input
The user wrote 10 tokens. Everything else was silently added.
System prompt800
Few-shot examples1,500
Conversation history4,000
RAG documents6,000
Tool definitions2,000
User message10
Total14,310 tokens
The user wrote one sentence. You paid for 14,800 tokens. If you don't measure this, you can't optimize it.