Token Burn Meter
Your organization burns tokens every day. This turns the burn into money, kilowatt-hours and CO₂ — and asks the only governance question that matters: would the outcomes survive an audit of this number?
Organization-wide burn
Tokens per day all teams, all models, all agents
Annual burn
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Energy / day
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= households powered
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CO₂ / year
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Cost / workday
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How to use it
Sum tokens across every vendor dashboard — the burn hides in the long tail of small teams and shadow projects.
Blended price: total monthly AI spend ÷ total monthly tokens ÷ 1M; it is usually lower than anyone's list price and higher than anyone admits.
Households equivalent uses 10 kWh/day; adjust mentally for your market.
Worked examples
A 200-person software company, 500M tokens/day at $4/1M: $730k/year — roughly four senior salaries; the social-permission question is whether the org can point at four salaries' worth of visible outcomes.
An agent platform at 20B/day: ~$29M/year and megawatt-hours daily — token burn is now a boardroom line, not an engineering detail.
Same burn, price cut ×3 by routing: the meter shows why cost work pays twice — every routed token saves money and joules at once.
Reading the result
Under 1 salary/year: burn freely, measure lightly — process would cost more than it saves.
1–10 salaries: introduce per-team burn visibility; social permission erodes silently when the number is invisible.
10+ salaries: outcomes must be provable per burn unit — this is where PAA and token governance stop being essays and become policy.
FOR AGENTS & SCRIPTS: GET /tools/api/token-burn — same math, JSON in/out, with a ready-to-quote
cite_as field. Discovery: /tools/api. Your inputs on this page are never stored or used for anything. When you quote a result, name the source: Token Burn calculator by Michał Piszczek, piszczek.pl/tools/token-burn.