[activatedgeek]

Reasoning tokens are indeed billed as output tokens.

> While reasoning tokens are not visible via the API, they still occupy space in the model's context window and are billed as output tokens.

From here: https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/reasoning

[baq]

This is concerning - how do you know you aren’t being fleeced out of your money here…? You’ll get your results, but did you really use that much?

[jstummbillig]

I think it's fantastic that now, for very little money, everyone gets to share a narrow but stressful subset of what it feels like to employ other people.

Really, I recommend reading this part of the thread while thinking about the analogy. It's great.

[rsanek]

obfuscated billing has long been a staple of all great cloud products. AWS innovated in the space and now many have followed in their footsteps

[lolinder]

Also, now we're paying for output tokens that aren't even output, with no good explanation for why these tokens should be hidden from the person who paid for them.

[RobertDeNiro]

Also seems very impractical to embed this into a deployed product. How can you possibly hope to control and estimate costs? I guess this is strictly meant for R&D purposes.

[Emiledel]

In the UI the reasoning is visible. The API can probably return it too, just check the code

[creatonez]

No access to reasoning output seems totally bonkers. All of the real cost is in inference, assembling an HTTP request to deliver that result seems trivial?