Yes, I use AI tools where they earn their place. I'd rather hand you the whole bill than pretend I don't — so here is what our tools cost, a band never a point, every figure sourced. You had to go looking for this, which is exactly the point.
A heavy working day — measured
12 July 2026 · 1,168,478 tokens across four autonomous sessions
| Low | Central | High | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | 117 Wh | 584 Wh | 2,337 Wh |
| Carbon | 46 g | 230 g CO₂e | 921 g |
| Water | 126 mL | 631 mL | 2,524 mL |
≈ 10 hours of a running laptop · 0.6 miles of driving · 2½ cups of water. The high end is 20 times the low end, and that width is the most honest thing down here.
Inference only — it excludes model training, my device and the hardware, because I can't yet measure those honestly. Method: FinOps GenAI Cost & Usage Tracker — live usage export · four-tier Scope-3 Cat-1 inference methodology (2026) · figures regenerated from live usage · last updated 2026-07-12. Read it, argue with it, hold me to it.