Questions about AI token usage

What Token NomNom is, how tokens are counted, what it costs, and what happens to your key and your prompts.

What is Token NomNom?

Token NomNom is a game built around AI token usage. You connect an AI provider with your own API key, send prompts, and the tokens you spend are counted and turned into in-app coins, achievements and a place on a live leaderboard. It takes the number most people try to minimise and makes it the score.

What is an AI token?

A token is the unit language models read and write in. Roughly, one token is about four characters of English, so 1,000 tokens is around 750 words. Providers bill per million tokens and count input and output separately, which is why the same prompt can cost different amounts on different models.

How do I track how many AI tokens I have used?

Token NomNom records a normalised usage record for every request: input tokens, output tokens, total, cached and reasoning tokens where the provider reports them, plus the model, duration and an estimated cost. Usage comes from the provider's own response, and where a provider reports nothing the figure is labelled as an estimate rather than presented as exact.

Is there a leaderboard for AI token usage?

Yes. Token NomNom ranks users by tokens burned, coins earned and burn sessions, over today, this week, this month and all time. You always see your own position even when you are outside the visible page.

Which AI providers are supported?

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, Mistral, OpenRouter, Together AI, Cohere, xAI, DeepSeek and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including a local or self-hosted model server. Each provider sits behind an adapter that normalises its usage reporting, so adding another is an adapter rather than a rewrite.

Is Token NomNom free?

The app itself is free and the coins are an in-app score with no monetary value. The tokens are not free: you bring your own API key and your provider bills you at their normal rates. Every connection has configurable limits on tokens per request, requests and tokens per day, and an estimated daily spend cap, and you see an estimated cost before a burn runs.

Is my API key safe?

Keys are encrypted before storage and only decrypted server-side to make the provider request. A key is never returned to the browser, never written to logs or error messages, and never stored in browser storage. After saving, only a masked hint such as sk-**********92A1 is ever shown.

Does Token NomNom store my prompts?

Prompt and output storage is a per-account setting you can switch off, in which case only the token counts are kept and the text is discarded. Another user's prompts are never shown publicly, and the community activity feed carries only a headline and a number, never prompt content.

How are coins calculated?

Coins are derived from validated usage server-side, as tokens divided by a configurable reward unit and multiplied by a reward rate, plus modifiers such as a weekend bonus, a daily streak and any running event. Every award is written to an append-only coin ledger with a breakdown, so any balance can be explained and audited. The browser never tells the server how many tokens it used.

What can I do with leftover AI API credits?

Unused credits on a monthly plan or a trial usually expire. Token NomNom gives them somewhere to go: connect the provider, burn the remaining quota, and get coins, achievements and leaderboard position out of it instead of nothing.

Can I compare token usage between providers?

Yes. Because every provider's response is normalised into the same usage record, your history shows the same fields for OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq and the rest, and the profile tracks per-provider and per-model totals. That makes it possible to compare what the same work costs in tokens across models.

Do I need an account?

You can browse the leaderboard without one. Burning requires an account, because coins, achievements, streaks and rank all have to belong to someone. You can sign in with an email and password, or with Google or GitHub.