Whitespace you are paying to store
Trailing spaces and stacked blank lines are billable and invisible.
Indentation and blank lines are not free. Leading spaces on a wrapped line, three blank lines between sections, and trailing whitespace left by an editor all become tokens.
The amounts are individually trivial and collectively real, particularly in prompts assembled from template strings where every line carries the indentation of the surrounding code. A prompt built inside a deeply nested Python function can carry eight leading spaces on every line.
This is the cheapest fix in the list because it is provably lossless: no model behaviour depends on a trailing space. If you strip indentation from your template literals, do it once at the boundary rather than by hand.
Summarise the ticket.
Then classify it.Summarise the ticket.
Then classify it.Check your own prompt
The analyser checks this pattern along with the other 25, prices each finding against your request volume, and hands back a rewritten prompt. It runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
Run the analyserMore on formatting
- Markdown tables padded for alignmentColumn alignment is whitespace, and whitespace is tokens.
- Shouting is billed by the letterALL-CAPS words split into more tokens than the same word in title case.
- Smart quotes from a word processorCurly quotes and em dashes cost several tokens each. Their ASCII twins cost one.
- ASCII art in a paid channelRows of equals signs are for humans reading a terminal, not for the model.