What is a Tokens?

A token is not quite a word. Common words often become a single token, while longer or unusual words get split into several. Punctuation and spaces count too. The practical upshot is that a paragraph of English text is usually a few dozen tokens more than its word count would suggest, and text in other languages or with lots of technical terms tends to use more.

Tokens matter for two reasons. First, most AI services measure usage in tokens, so the length of both the question and the answer affects what a conversation costs to run. Second, every model has a limit on how many tokens it can consider at once, which puts a ceiling on how much source material and conversation history can be in play for any single reply.

For a business running a website chat widget, this is mostly invisible plumbing, and it should be. Clerkzo charges a flat monthly price starting at nineteen dollars rather than metering your conversations by token, so a busy week does not turn into a surprise bill. What tokens do influence is design: keeping the pages the widget learns from clear and well structured means the most relevant content fits comfortably into each answer.