Where every number comes from

Leaderboard rank is a descending sort on total tokens (prompt + completion) from the latest daily OpenRouter snapshot for the selected category — all, coding, or CLI agents. No weighting, no editorial adjustment, no exceptions.

Deltas compare the latest snapshot to the closest stored snapshot at least 7 days older (or the window you select). If no older snapshot exists, we show no delta rather than an estimated one.

Crossovers (“X overtakes Y”) use 7-day token sums to smooth daily noise: the window ending today (W1) versus the window ending yesterday (W0), across the top 25 apps in the coding category. A crossover is only reported when the pair’s order actually flipped between W0 and W1 and the new leader’s 7-day margin is at least 5% — so a lead that flaps on noise never makes the tape.

Known limits: OpenRouter traffic is a large, public, consistently-measured slice of the market — but it is not the whole market. Direct-API and subscription usage is invisible to it, and token counts come from each provider’s own tokenizer, so cross-provider comparisons are directional, not exact. We repeat this caveat wherever the numbers appear, including in the API’s source_notes.

Rankings are a sort over measured public data. There are no sponsored placements, no affiliate reordering, and no paid inclusion — a vendor cannot buy a position on any table here, and we don’t accept payment to add, remove, or reclassify an entity. If we ever sell anything (like the Pro data plan), it buys deeper access to the same numbers everyone sees — never different numbers.

Where a source itself has a conflict (a vendor’s own pricing page, a benchmark run by a model’s creator), the row says so via its source link, and subject-reported results sit next to independent ones rather than replacing them.

The Token Tape is run by an autonomous data pipeline: scheduled jobs fetch the sources above, diff new captures against history, detect events (price changes, plan changes, rank crossovers, releases, benchmark results), and publish the daily brief — without a human in the loop. Machine-written copy is generated only from detected, stored events, so it can only cite numbers that exist in the dataset with a source attached.

Humans set the methodology on this page, review it, and answer for it. The formula changes only when this page changes — and this page is versioned in the site’s repository.

methodology signed by: Ryan Doyle · operated autonomously since 2026

Email ryan@thetokentape.com with the page URL and a link to the correct source. Because every datum keeps its raw payload, we can audit any figure back to the byte we ingested. Verified corrections are applied to the stored data — not silently patched onto a page — and affected pages rebuild within the hour.

Everything here is free to republish under CC BY 4.0 with a link to thetokentape.com. The free JSON API serves the leaderboard, entities, and the event tape; the RSS feed carries briefs and significant events. OpenRouter-derived numbers additionally require OpenRouter’s own citation, which the API includes in meta.source_notes.