Glossary
Token
A token is the small chunk of text an AI actually reads and writes: roughly three-quarters of a word in English. AI limits and prices are counted in tokens, which is why long chats and big documents cost more.
AI doesn’t read words; it reads tokens. “Strawberry” might be two tokens, “the” is one, and a long German compound can be five. As a rule of thumb, 1,000 tokens is about 750 English words, a page and a half.
Why should you care? Because tokens are the currency of the whole AI world. The context window (how much the AI can keep in mind) is measured in tokens. API pricing is per million tokens. Free-plan usage limits are, under the hood, token budgets.
It’s like a taxi meter: the fare runs on distance, not on how important your trip is. Paste a 200-page contract and you’ve used a lot of meter, whether your question about it was big or small.
Where you’ll meet this
Mostly between the lines: “message limit reached,” “document too long,” or pricing pages quoting “per 1M tokens.” If you keep hitting limits and wonder whether a paid plan would fix it, our plan picker does that math for your actual usage.