How I Built PromptBurn: A Free Tool to Count LLM Tokens and Slash API Bills β‘π₯
Hey everyone! π As developers, weβve all been there: you push a feature leveraging GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, or Gemini 1.5, only to look at your API billing dashboard a week later and wonder how your token usage spiraled out
Hey everyone! π
As developers, weβve all been there: you push a feature leveraging GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, or Gemini 1.5, only to look at your API billing dashboard a week later and wonder how your token usage spiraled out of control so fast.
Estimating token costs and checking prompt sizes shouldn't require running heavy Python scripts locally or digging through complex documentation every single time. Thatβs why I built PromptBurnβa fast, free, and minimalist developer utility designed to give you instant clarity on your LLM costs.
π What Does PromptBurn Do?
PromptBurn is built specifically for AI engineers, indie hackers, and developers who want to keep their API budgets lean. Key features include:
β‘ Instant Token Counting: Paste your text, code snippets, or system prompts to get real-time token counts.
π° API Cost Simulation: Instantly calculate and compare estimated costs across major frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google).
βοΈ Model Comparison: Side-by-side breakdowns to help you choose the most cost-effective model for your specific payload.
π 100% Privacy-First: Your prompts stay private and client-focused.
π οΈ Under the Hood & Technical Challenges
Building PromptBurn was an exciting exercise in frontend performance and user experience:
Client-Side Optimization: Ensuring lightning-fast feedback loops so developers don't experience lag when typing or testing large prompts.
Responsive Dark UI: Designed with a sleek, modern dark-themed aesthetic (featuring signature blue/purple gradients and neon indicators) that developer communities love.
SEO & Content Strategy: Writing deep-dive optimization guides focusing on JSON compression, token reduction, and context rot mitigation to help fellow devs write leaner prompts.
π‘ Try It Out & Let Me Know What You Think!
PromptBurn is live and completely free to use.
π Check it out here: https://www.prompt-burn.com/
I would love to hear your feedback, feature requests, or ideas on how you manage LLM token costs in your own production apps. Drop a comment below! π
Originally published by Dev.to WebDev. Aggregated on AIWithGhost for educational purposes β full credit and traffic to the original publisher.