Tokens & Pricing
Billable tokens
The tokens you actually charge a customer for — as opposed to the tokens you merely consumed. When you resell AI, billable tokens are the input and output tokens attributed to a specific customer of record, rated at your price (your provider cost plus your margin) rather than the raw provider cost.
Example
A tenant runs 4.2M input and 1.1M output tokens in a month. Those are billable tokens attributed to that tenant; rated at your markup they become the tenant's invoice line — not a flat tier that ignores how much they actually used.
This is a Tokenality concept. See how it works in the product overview or the live playground.
Related terms
Usage-based billing
Charging customers in proportion to what they actually consume — tokens, calls, or compute — instead of a flat fee, seat count, or user-count proxy. It aligns price with cost: because AI cost scales with tokens, usage-based billing is the only pricing that keeps a reseller's margin stable as customers grow.
Revenue leakage
Revenue a business could bill for but doesn't — because of a pricing proxy, an un-billed overage, a dropped metering event, or a missed reconciliation. For AI resellers it's the gap between usage-based cost and proxy-based price; industry estimates put it at 3–9% of revenue for usage-based software.
Cost per 1K tokens
The standard way pricing is quoted: dollars per 1,000 tokens, listed separately for input and output. Providers increasingly quote per million tokens, but the per-1K figure is still the mental unit for estimating a call.
Output tokens (completion tokens)
The tokens the model generates back to you. Output tokens almost always cost more per token than input tokens — often 3–5× more — because generating text is the expensive part.