AllocateWhat are tokens in AI?
Tokens are the units AI models read and write: fragments of words, roughly four characters of English each. Model pricing, context windows, and latency are all measured in tokens. A thousand tokens is about 750 words; a million input tokens costs from $0.02 on small open models to $5 on frontier flagships at provider list prices.
Token-metered pricing means idle systems cost nothing and busy ones scale linearly with real work, which is why serious platforms bill on token meterage rather than seats.
Watching tokens per route exposes the real economics of each agent: what a resolved support conversation or a triaged claim actually costs.
Count tokens in your own textRelated terms
Allocate is the cloud inference platform for companies that want to train and run their own models.