Silent LLM Cost Errors: Inconsistent Token Accounting Undercounts Usage by Up to 46x
qaiser_mehdi · reddit · 2026-09-23
After weeks of measuring LLM costs, the author catalogs silent accounting failures: Google, OpenAI and Anthropic disagree on what token counts mean (thinking tokens billed differently), so naive dashboards can undercount real cost by 46x on thinking-heavy calls. Multi-subagent harnesses emit no per-step usage, creating unattributable calls, and the author found two such bugs in his own metering tool. He released a dependency-free single-file tool with --demo/--selftest flags and asks whether frameworks report per-step usage at all.
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