Reasoning models and thinking tokens

A reasoning model generates an internal chain of intermediate tokens before it writes the answer. Those tokens are billed at the output rate and usually stripped from the response, so a request whose prompt and visible answer are unchanged can cost eleven times as much across effort settings. This chapter shows where they appear in the usage block, why a maximum output setting does not bound them the way you expect, how to price them from sampled traffic rather than from answer length, and where cost per request is the wrong comparison to make.

Token economics — read the current version at https://daviddominguez.dev/learn/en/token-economics/reasoning-model

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