Basic Mode: For Everyone Who Preferred Plain-Text Email

TokenScale now has a second face. Basic mode is the whole site — the price table, the full price-change history, this journal, the changelog — condensed onto one plain, fast page. No slot machine, no sound effects, no animations. Same verified numbers. Everything one click apart.

I'll be honest about why this site is playful: numbers are not really my thing. The slot machine, the sounds, the Manager's Notepad — that's me turning a pricing table into something I actually want to look at. It's how I make sense of this stuff, and plenty of visitors have told me it's how they make sense of it too.

But I also spent years in an R&D department alongside about fifty engineers, and if that taught me one lasting thing, it's that not everyone wants the show. I remember when HTML email arrived — colours, fonts, embedded pictures — and half that room simply refused it. They kept their mail clients set to plain text and would ask you, politely at first, to do the same. It wasn't stubbornness. It was a philosophy: say the thing, skip the decoration, respect my time.

So this one's for the plain-text people

tokenscale.dev/basic opens straight onto the table: all 22 providers, sortable by any column, with the same content-size landmarks (yes, The Hobbit is still there — its word count is verified, which is the least fun fact on the whole site and therefore perfect for Basic mode). Three more tabs sit beside it: History lists every price change we've ever recorded in plain terms — what the rate was, what it became, "43% cheaper" or "×3.8 pricier" — sortable by date, provider, or size of the move. Journal and Changelog show every entry as a dated headline; tap one for the gist, follow the link if you want the whole story. It defaults to a light page, and the palette picker in the top corner offers the same dark options as everywhere else — pick once and it follows you across the site.

To be clear, the full experience isn't going anywhere — it's still the front door, and it's still where I have the most fun. And a small confession from those R&D years: some of the plain-text crowd, the very same engineers, were also the first to write elaborate ASCII art into their signatures. People are wonderfully inconsistent. So both modes stay, both get the same nightly-verified numbers, and you're welcome to be a different person on different days.

Basic mode lives at tokenscale.dev/basic. If it's missing something you need — or has one toy too many left in it — tell me.

You Can't See How Much Claude You Have Left. So I Built a Fuel Gauge.

Claude runs on a weekly limit you can't see — until you slam into it mid-thought. The Claude Fuel Gauge turns that invisible budget into something you can read at a glance: a fuel tank that starts full each week and drains as you work. It's free, and it runs entirely on your own machine.

The blind spot

If you use Claude every day, there's a strange gap: there's no quarter-tank warning light. Usage runs on a weekly cycle, but most of the time you only learn where you stand the moment you hit the wall — no glance, no heads-up, just plenty of room right up until come back next week. For anyone pushing Claude hard, that's a quiet anxiety: you're spending something you can't see.

The gauge

The Claude Fuel Gauge is a single HTML file. You open it in your browser and the needle sweeps up to your current level — green when you've got headroom, drifting toward empty as the week wears on. That's the whole experience: open it, read the tank, get on with your day.

It works by having Claude keep its own gauge topped up. After a session, Claude jots a tiny note inside the file — the date, the model, an estimate of tokens in and out — and the next time you open the page it draws your level from those notes. You never touch a number. And because it only ever reads a log that lives inside the file itself, nothing leaves your machine: no account, no sign-in, no calls to us or to Anthropic.

The one requirement is Claude Desktop (Cowork) — the version that can write to a file on your computer. Setup takes about a minute, once. After that, reopening the page is the entire ritual.

Your week, measured in novels

Tokens are an abstraction nobody can feel. So alongside the gauge, the tool shows your week in a unit you can actually picture: novels. One novel ≈ The Hobbit ≈ 95,356 words ≈ 127,000 tokens — the same yardstick behind our Novel Index. "Nine novels read, half a novel written this week" tells you something real in a way "1.3M tokens" never will.

An honest gauge, not a billing statement

It's a friendly estimate, not a meter wired into Anthropic's billing. Real limits are rolling, model-weighted windows, so the numbers here are approximations — tuned to feel right and to move with real use. For exact figures your Claude settings stay the source of truth; this is the at-a-glance companion to that page, not a replacement for it. It's also yours: free to use, modify, and share.

👉 Get the Claude Fuel Gauge · See the Novel Index · Free, runs on your own machine

Claude Fuel Gauge: a single offline HTML file. Estimates usage from session logs Claude writes locally. Not affiliated with Anthropic; not connected to billing. Use at your own risk.

DeepSeek Just Cut Prices Another 75%, and June Isn't Over Yet

A frontier reasoning model is now priced like a mid-tier one. DeepSeek dropped its V4 Pro tier by 75% on 11 June. It's the second time this month the cheapest way to do serious AI work got cheaper, and we logged every step of it.

Every night, TokenScale checks the price of every model we track and writes it down. Most nights nothing moves and the chart draws another flat step. DeepSeek does not let many nights stay flat.

What happened

On 11 June, DeepSeek made the cut to its V4 Pro tier permanent: $1.74 to $0.435 per million input tokens, and $3.48 to $0.87 per million output. That's a 75% reduction on a model that competes at the frontier on reasoning. A flagship-class model, now selling at mid-tier money.

It's the second leg of a month-long undercut. Back in mid-May the same tier ran a 75% promo, the discount briefly became the list price on 1 June, snapped back to $1.74 on 4 June, and then on 11 June DeepSeek made the low number the real number and kept it there. The chart caught the whole wobble.

Promo, list, revert, permanent. Four nights of price archaeology on a single tier, the kind of thing you only see if someone is writing the number down every night instead of trusting the marketing page.

What it means in real content

Token prices are abstract. So here is the part TokenScale exists to translate. The Novel Index asks one question every night: what's the cheapest price to make an AI write a whole novel, The Hobbit, 95,356 words? The floor has held near half a cent for weeks, and it stays there precisely because providers like DeepSeek keep undercutting each other to hold it down. A 75% cut on a frontier tier is what that floor looks like from underneath.

DeepSeek's reputation is the cheap-and-cheerful lite tier, V4 Flash at $0.14 per million. What changed on 11 June is that the frontier reasoning tier now sits at mid-tier prices too. The aggressor on price just brought the fight upmarket.

Why the chart still shows the wobble

We don't smooth it out. On TokenScale a flat line means a price held and a step means it moved, so DeepSeek's promo-then-revert-then-permanent fortnight stays on the chart as a small permanent record: the two prices this tier wore in June, and the exact night the low one stopped being a promo and became the truth. The marketing page only ever shows you today. The chart remembers the path.

👉 See the Novel Index · June's biggest price moves · Tracked nightly since 12 May 2026

DeepSeek V4 Pro: $1.74/$3.48 to $0.435/$0.87 per 1M tokens. Cut made permanent 11 June 2026. Logged the same night.

The Three-Day Model

A frontier AI model launched on a Tuesday and was switched off by the government on Friday. Our price chart caught the whole thing.

Every night, TokenScale checks the price of every model we track and writes it down. It is the least dramatic job in the world. Most nights nothing has changed, so the chart draws another flat step and goes back to sleep. A flat line is the usual result, and that is the point: boring is what trustworthy data looks like.

This week the line moved.

What happened

On 9 June, Anthropic released Fable 5, its first generally available "Mythos-class" model, a tier above Opus. The next night, our Anthropic flagship slot jumped: $5 / $25 to $10 / $50 per million tokens. Twice the price of Opus 4.8. On the chart, the flagship line stepped up.

It held there for two nights.

Then, on the evening of Friday 12 June, the US government handed Anthropic an export-control directive ordering it to cut off Fable 5 and its sibling, Mythos 5, for any foreign national, inside or outside the country. Because an order that broad reaches everyone, including Anthropic's own staff, the only way to comply was to switch the models off for the whole world. Anthropic did it within hours. Every other Claude model stayed up. (The reported trigger, via Axios: another company claimed it had jailbroken Mythos.)

By our next price check, the flagship slot was Opus 4.8 again. $5 / $25. The line stepped back down.

Two nights up. Then gone.

Why the chart still shows it

We do not erase the spike. On TokenScale a flat line means a price held and a step up means it rose, so the Fable 5 episode is now a small permanent marker on the Anthropic chart: the two nights a model sold at twice the price of Opus, bracketed by the day it launched and the day it vanished. You cannot buy it anymore. The chart remembers that you briefly could.

I had just rebuilt the part of TokenScale that renders this: the interactive receipt, where the model list is the menu and the receipt is your check. It was an idea I had been sitting on for a while. It landed in a single night and a handful of prompts, and came out leaner than the thing it replaced, about 20% fewer lines of code than I started with. The first real event it ever printed was the death of a frontier model.

👉 See the Anthropic chart · Tracked nightly since 12 May 2026

Fable 5: launched 9 June 2026. Pulled 12 June 2026. Logged in between.

The Chart: AI Models Ranked Like the Pop Charts — Except the #1 Is Yours

Pop charts have been counting down the hits since 1913. That summer, Billboard printed its first ranking — "Last Week's Ten Best Sellers Among The Popular Songs" — based on sheet music people bought to play on the piano at home. The format outlived the piano, the record, and the radio. We still love a countdown.

So I built one for AI models.

The problem with a "best model"

Ask which AI model is best and you'll get an argument, because everyone's asking a slightly different question. Some people want the cheapest thing that works. Some want the sharpest answer regardless of cost. Some want speed. A few of us care about energy.

Those are four different charts. Most rankings pretend they're one.

TokenScale already does the hard part — turning "$5 per million tokens" into money you can picture. The Chart is the playful sibling: it takes the same nightly price data and lets you lean.

How it works

There's a dial. Pull it toward price 💸, brains 🧠, speed ⚡ or energy 🌱, and the whole chart re-ranks in front of you. The model that suits you rises to the top and gets the crown 👑. Lean a different way and someone else takes it.

Then there's the time machine. Every rate on the Text chart comes from our own price checks, logged nightly since 12 May 2026. Scrub the dial back through the log and watch models climb and fall as prices moved — a countdown that runs backwards as well as forwards. It's the same idea as a singles chart. The difference is that the audience of one is you.

What it is, and isn't, yet

This is an early beta, and I'd rather say that plainly than oversell it. The price log is young — a few weeks deep and growing every night. We used to show a hand-reconstructed 2023–2025 era here and I pulled it, because this page should only say things we can back with our own data. The Creative chart is still hand-curated for now.

So treat it as a toy that's becoming a tool. Have a play, lean it your way, and if a number looks wrong, tell me — that's literally how the history gets better.

👉 Play the Chart

Five New Labs: TokenScale Now Tracks 21 Providers

When TokenScale launched, it compared 16 providers. As of tonight it compares 21. I added the five names that had become impossible to leave off — four Chinese frontier labs and Meta's own first-party API.

Who Joined

DeepSeek used to be the lone Chinese lab on the board. That stopped making sense — there are now four open-weight labs people genuinely compare against each other every day:

• Alibaba Qwen — Qwen-Flash, Plus and Max. Leads the open-weight tool-calling benchmarks.
• Zhipu GLM — GLM-5 tops several open-weight leaderboards and is MIT-licensed.
• Moonshot Kimi — K2.6 is a favourite for agentic and coding work.
• MiniMax — the M-series, cheap and popular for agent workloads.
• Meta Llama — Meta now hosts Llama on its own API, so you no longer have to go through a reseller to get a first-party price.

Why It Matters

The whole reason TokenScale exists is to show that the floor keeps dropping. Four of these five are open-weight, and they price like it — a Qwen-Plus or a Kimi sits an order of magnitude below a US frontier flagship for many jobs. Putting them next to GPT and Claude in plain content terms is the clearest way to see how much pressure the open labs are putting on price.

Being Honest About the Data

Two caveats, because this is a build-in-public journal and not a press release. A few top-tier prices — Kimi's Turbo variant, MiniMax's Pro tier, Meta's Behemoth — aren't published yet, so those are careful estimates I'll correct the moment real numbers appear. And the new providers start with a flat price line: the nightly tracker only began watching them tonight, so their history builds from here, the same way every other provider's did.

Same as always: one HTML file, no framework, verified each evening. Now just five labs wider.

12 Days In: 1,400 Visitors, a Netherlands Mystery, and What Comes Next

TokenScale launched on 18 May 2026. No budget, no team, no existing audience. Just a single HTML file on Cloudflare and a LinkedIn post.

Twelve days later, here's what the data looks like. And more importantly: what I think it means for where LLM pricing is heading.

The Numbers

The Shape of the Launch

May 20 was the day I posted to Hacker News (Show HN) and LinkedIn simultaneously. Traffic jumped from a 70/day baseline to 486 unique visitors. The following days settled into a floor of around 85 to 90 per day. Nobody paid for that. It just held.

Product Hunt went nowhere. I launched cold with no community, ended at #82 with 2 points. That was expected. PH rewards existing audiences, not new ones. Hacker News was the real driver.

Where Traffic Came From

Netherlands at #1 with more traffic than the US. I still don't know exactly why. Hacker News skews heavily toward Northern European readers, so that is probably part of it. Something may also have been shared in a Dutch or German developer community I'm not aware of. If you came from one of those: I'd genuinely love to know where.

What I do know: EU developer communities responded faster than the US ones. That's useful information for where to focus outreach next.

What the Pricing Chaos Showed

May 2026 was one of the most volatile months in LLM pricing history. On or around May 15: OpenAI's o3 Pro dropped 80%. xAI Grok dropped 83%. DeepSeek dropped 75%. Gemini Pro went up 60%.

These are enormous moves. And most developers had no simple way to track them. The tool launched at exactly the right moment. Not because I planned it that way, but because AI pricing has become genuinely hard to follow.

How It Was Built

One HTML file. No framework. No backend. No build step. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages for free. Built entirely on my phone, using Claude, over about 11 months of conversations.

I'm not a programmer in the traditional sense. I'm an animation professional who started building things by talking to AI in 2025 and couldn't stop. The nightly price check that now runs automatically at 8pm? That's also a prompt. It searches 16 provider pages, writes a JSON file, takes a backup, and tells me what changed. No server. No pipeline. Just a scheduled task.

My Prediction

Next update in a few days. Drop me a note if you have a question or a pricing anomaly worth investigating: willbilton@gmail.com