Documentation/Core Concepts/Thinking & Reasoning Tokens
Thinking & Reasoning Tokens
Accurately extract and bill hidden reasoning tokens across modern frontier models.
Thinking & Reasoning Tokens
Modern reasoning models (OpenAI o1/o3-mini, GPT-5, Claude 3.7 Thinking, DeepSeek R1) generate hundreds or thousands of internal **reasoning/thinking tokens** that are invisible in the final text response but billed by providers at full output rates.
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The Hidden Token Problem
If you only count visible output text, a prompt generating 20 words with 4,000 reasoning tokens will cost $0.05 while your meter reports $0.0001—wiping out your profit margins.
`vibezcheck` automatically intercepts and extracts hidden reasoning tokens from provider stream details:
json
{
"usage": {
"inputTokens": 650,
"outputTokens": 2400,
"totalTokens": 3050,
"reasoningTokens": 2200,
"visibleOutputTokens": 200
},
"cost": {
"inputUSD": 0.000715,
"outputUSD": 0.010560,
"reasoningCostUSD": 0.009680,
"totalUSD": 0.011275
}
}---