What is a token?
- About 4 characters or ¾ of a word in English.
- 100 tokens ≈ 75 words. A full page ≈ 500–700 tokens.
- Code, numbers and non-English text often use more tokens per word.
- Images, audio and PDFs are converted into tokens too.
The four kinds of tokens
Context window
The context window is the most tokens a model can consider at once — history, files and its own answer combined.
Aura keeps the last 40 turns of a conversation in view and trims older ones in blocks, keeping answers focused and caching effective. Very long prompts (over roughly 100k–272k tokens depending on the model) are billed at a higher tier by providers.
Reasoning effort
- Low — quick factual answers.
- Medium — Aura’s default for most chat.
- High — complex analysis, math and code (Frontier High, Thinking).
How this becomes credits
Aura converts real provider token costs into credits. That’s why:- A typical Orchestration message costs about ~20 credits (four models answer, then a comparison).
- Long documents, high reasoning and long answers cost more.
- Follow-ups in the same chat are often cheaper thanks to prompt caching.
Spend fewer tokens
- One topic per chat; start a new chat when the topic changes.
- State the format and length you want.
- Paste only the relevant part of long documents.
- Use Unlimited for everyday questions, Orchestration for high-stakes ones.
- Pick Frontier Low or Efficient unless you need High.
Why did a short question cost more than expected?
Why did a short question cost more than expected?
The model also reads the whole conversation, attached files and live search results — those are input tokens too.