{"slug": "how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills", "title": "How I Built PromptBurn: A Free Tool to Count LLM Tokens and Slash API Bills ⚡🔥", "summary": "A developer built PromptBurn, a free client-side web tool that counts LLM tokens and simulates API costs across OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models so engineers can compare pricing before sending prompts. The utility offers real-time token counting, side-by-side model cost breakdowns and a privacy-first design that keeps prompts in the browser.", "body_md": "As developers, we’ve 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.\n\nEstimating token costs and checking prompt sizes shouldn't require running heavy Python scripts locally or digging through complex documentation every single time. That’s why I built PromptBurn—a fast, free, and minimalist developer utility designed to give you instant clarity on your LLM costs.\n\n🚀 What Does PromptBurn Do?\n\nPromptBurn is built specifically for AI engineers, indie hackers, and developers who want to keep their API budgets lean. Key features include:\n\n⚡ Instant Token Counting: Paste your text, code snippets, or system prompts to get real-time token counts.\n\n💰 API Cost Simulation: Instantly calculate and compare estimated costs across major frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google).\n\n⚖️ Model Comparison: Side-by-side breakdowns to help you choose the most cost-effective model for your specific payload.\n\n🔒 100% Privacy-First: Your prompts stay private and client-focused.\n\n🛠️ Under the Hood & Technical Challenges\n\nBuilding PromptBurn was an exciting exercise in frontend performance and user experience:\n\nClient-Side Optimization: Ensuring lightning-fast feedback loops so developers don't experience lag when typing or testing large prompts.\n\nResponsive Dark UI: Designed with a sleek, modern dark-themed aesthetic (featuring signature blue/purple gradients and neon indicators) that developer communities love.\n\nSEO & Content Strategy: Writing deep-dive optimization guides focusing on JSON compression, token reduction, and context rot mitigation to help fellow devs write leaner prompts.\n\n💡 Try It Out & Let Me Know What You Think!\n\nPromptBurn is live and completely free to use.\n\n👉 Check it out here: [https://www.prompt-burn.com/](https://www.prompt-burn.com/)\n\nI 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! 👇", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/diamouaki/how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills-2o1", "published_at": "2026-11-14 10:08:20+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-11-14 10:20:45.072714+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "large-language-models", "developer-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["PromptBurn", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Google", "GPT-4o", "Claude 3.5", "Gemini 1.5"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/how-i-built-promptburn-a-free-tool-to-count-llm-tokens-and-slash-api-bills.jsonld"}}