Answer

Token Pricing: You Pay Per Word, Basically

When you use an AI tool, you don't pay per minute or per question — you pay for tokens. A token is roughly three-quarters of a word. So every word you type AND every word the AI writes back gets counted and charged. Companies set a price per thousand or million tokens. The more you chat, the more tokens you burn. It's like a taxi meter, but for words instead of miles. Cheap models cost fractions of a penny per thousand tokens. Fancy models cost way more.

Example: You paste a 10-page contract into ChatGPT's API and ask for a summary. That's thousands of tokens going in, plus hundreds coming out — and your credit card gets charged for every single one.