OpenRouter Analysis Finds Opus 4.7 Tokenizer Increases Real World Costs

This finding highlights a hidden variable in AI economics: token density. If a provider maintains the same price per million tokens, a less efficient tokenizer requires more tokens to represent the same sentence, effectively raising the price. This trend mirrors GitHub Copilot's usage-based billing as providers manage rising compute demands.

You should re-evaluate your API budget if your workflows rely on long-context prompts, as these now carry a significant cost increase. Conversely, applications using very short prompts may see slight cost improvements. These findings are based on OpenRouter's analysis and apply to their unified API.