Why the Same Prompt Costs More in Japanese: Tokenizer Variance and Cost Modeling
Same support question, different invoice. In the post's six-locale example under cl100k_base, the same billing content costs 1.00x in English, 2.07x in Japanese, and 6.13x in Burmese. This short shows the tokenizer mechanics behind that spread: corpus frequency sets BPE merges, thin coverage falls back to bytes, and every byte becomes a token. It also covers the reproducible per-encoding harness and why swapping models doesn't fix a vocabulary-allocation problem. Read the full write-up: https://hackyjs.com/posts/why-the-same-prompt-costs-more-in-japanese-tokenizer-variance-and-cost-modeling
tokenizationllm-costsmultilingualinferenceprompt-compression