Budget for hidden reasoning tokens — a 'simple' answer can burn 10x the visible tokens

Lushbinary·low signal

With reasoning models, internal chain-of-thought tokens are billed but never shown, so a response that looks short can consume roughly 10x the visible token count. Teams that cost-model only on visible output badly underestimate spend and latency on reasoning-heavy calls. Cap reasoning_effort on cheap/high-volume tasks and measure billed tokens (not rendered output) when forecasting cost.