AI Economics Tools // cost

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

blended $/1M J/token gCO2/kWh

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 — or take the DOI and BibTeX from /cite.

PUT THIS CALCULATOR ON YOUR OWN PAGE:

<iframe src="https://piszczek.pl/tools/token-burn/embed" width="100%" height="900" style="border:0" loading="lazy" title="Token Burn calculator"></iframe>

— free, no tracking, keeps the byline.

Questions and answers

What does an organisation's AI token usage actually burn?

At 316 million tokens a day and 4 dollars per million, the bill is about 462,000 dollars a year and the emissions roughly 12.8 tonnes of CO2 - the continuous energy draw of about nine households.