What is openai_count_tokens?

openai_count_tokens is a small utility that counts how many "tokens" a piece of text will use when sent to OpenAI models like GPT-3.5-turbo. This matters because OpenAI charges by the token rather than by the word, and a token is roughly a piece of a word, so keeping track of token counts helps you predict costs before making API calls. The project runs as a simple web service. You send it a string of text and tell it which model you're targeting, and it replies with the number of tokens that text contains. For example, a 60-character sample with some Chinese characters returns 28 tokens. The service handles multilingual text and special characters without issue, so you don't have to worry about text complexity skewing the count. Anyone building apps on top of OpenAI's API would find this useful. If you're a founder budgeting for chat costs or a developer building a feature that warns users when they're approaching a token limit, this gives you a reliable pre-check. It could also help when you need to make sure a prompt fits within a model's maximum input size before submitting it. The README keeps setup brief: you can run it through Docker and access it via a local endpoint on port 8001. The code itself relies on well-established libraries for tokenization and web serving, so the counting logic should match what OpenAI actually uses. The README doesn't go into much detail beyond the basic usage example and setup instructions, so you may need to explore the code or experiment with it to understand advanced options or edge cases.