Lesson 1: Tokens: what the model reads and bills
22 min read·13 Oct 2026
Module 2 · Lesson 1 · About 45 minutes · Needs: Module 1, Lesson 1 (what a token is in outline, TinyLM's tokeniser)
The situation
It is Wednesday 17 June 2026, week 3. Joel, the Billing Operations Lead, sets the budget: at most one cent of model fees per ticket, on average. Providers bill per token, not per ticket or word. So Joel wants three answers. How many tokens is Ana Duarte's ticket, T-1001? Does the same ticket cost more in Japanese or Hindi? And can you know the count before sending? (Quillpath and its data are made up for this course.)