Claude Certified Architect Professional (CCAR-P) Practice Test 2026 - Free CCAR-P Practice Questions and Study Guide

Token usage is the total number of tokens processed in an interaction—the tokens in your input plus the tokens produced in the model’s output. This quantity directly drives cost because pricing is typically per 1,000 tokens, so more tokens mean more money spent. It also determines capacity or throughput: processing more tokens requires more compute and memory, which limits how many tokens you can handle per second.

Think of latency as the time it takes for a single interaction to complete, not how much work is demanded. Throughput is about how many interactions or how many tokens you can process per unit time, but the amount of work you’re asking the model to do is captured by token usage. If you increase either the input length or the length of the generated response, token usage goes up, and both cost and capacity are affected accordingly.

For example, a 200-token prompt that yields a 600-token reply totals 800 tokens. If you make the reply longer, say 1200 tokens, total token usage rises to 1400 tokens, increasing cost and reducing how many tokens you can process in a given time.