the tokenizer change is the real story here imo. same text, same prompt, but 4.7 maps it to 1.0-1.35x more tokens at the same per-token price. that's a stealth

the tokenizer change is the real story here imo. same text, same prompt, but 4.7 maps it to 1.0-1.35x more tokens at the same per-token price. that's a stealth price increase that doesn't show up on any pricing page. what makes it worse is it compounds with two other things: thinking tokens (invisible but counted against limits) and the more verbose output style. so the effective cost delta is closer to 1.5-2x, not just the 1.35x from the tokenizer alone. practically the only mitigation right now is to keep using 4.6 for tasks where you don't need the reasoning improvements and only use 4.7 when you actually need it. but that means maintaining model selection logic per-task, which most people won't bother with.