YAML vs JSON: The Hidden Token Tax That's Costing You Money - Wayne Workman

Created 2/27/2026 at 10:38:58 PM • Edited 2/27/2026 at 10:40:40 PM
https://wayne.theworkmans.us/posts/2025/09/2025-09-24-yaml-vs-json-tokenization-costs.html

nd what most people dont realize is that YAML's human-friendly formatting comes with a hidden cost, it uses more tokens than JSON for the exact same data, which means you're literally paying extra for those nice indentations and lack of brackets.

YAML consistently uses 6-10% more tokens than JSON for identical data

Some models actually perform better with YAML despite the higher token count. Nova models in particular showed this weird preference. Meanwhile, Claude models generally performed better with JSON.

Sonnet 4 scored 93.3% with JSON and 76.7% with YAML, while Opus 4.1 only managed 73.3% with JSON and 66.7% with YAML.

Something interesting I noticed while analyzing the data, by stripping out unnecessary GitHub metadata (stuff like URLs, IDs, and fields you'll never use), you could reduce your token count by up to 80%. Thats not a typo. EIGHTY PERCENT.

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