Paul Kinlan published a blog post a couple of days ago [1] with some interesting data, that show output tokens only account for 4% of token usage.
It's a pretty wide-reaching article, so here's the relevant quote (emphasis mine):
> Real-world data from OpenRouter’s programming category shows 93.4% input tokens, 2.5% reasoning tokens, and just 4.0% output tokens. It’s almost entirely input.
It's a pretty wide-reaching article, so here's the relevant quote (emphasis mine):
> Real-world data from OpenRouter’s programming category shows 93.4% input tokens, 2.5% reasoning tokens, and just 4.0% output tokens. It’s almost entirely input.
[1]: https://aifoc.us/the-token-salary/