Because water is the hidden cost of intelligence.
Live app: lesterhau.github.io/tokenwater
No download. No account. Open in any browser and you're done.
You use AI every day. You have no idea how much water that costs.
Microsoft used 6.4 billion liters in 2022 — up 34% year-over-year. Google: +20% the same period. The servers running Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity generation. That number grows every time you send a message. No one tells you. There's no meter running. There's no bill.
TokenWater is the meter.
TokenWater is a setup tool, not a dashboard. You open it once, set your weekly water quota, pick your AI platforms, and copy a memory snippet for each one. Paste the snippet into your AI's memory settings. Close the tab. Done.
From that point on, your AI tracks your water usage automatically — no app running, no tab to keep open, nothing to log.
You do not need to keep this page open after setup.
Every morning, your first conversation shows you:
- Yesterday's water usage (in liters and a physical comparison — "about one toilet flush")
- Your weekly pace and projection
- How you compare to casual, regular, and power users
- Alerts at 50%, 75%, 90%, 95%, and 100% of your weekly quota
- 13 platforms supported across persistent memory and session-only tiers
- Water comparisons in plain English (water bottles, showers, toilet flushes)
- Anonymous community impact counter — see how many people are tracking
- Monthly refresh reminder baked into every snippet
- Discourages unnecessary AI follow-up questions to reduce token waste
- Praise system for good usage — irreverent, never sycophantic
- Shareable weekly stat with #TokenWater hashtag auto-generated
- Over-quota alerts at 100% and 110%
| Platform | Memory | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Claude | ✅ Persistent | Settings → Capabilities → Memory → Manage edits |
| ChatGPT | ✅ Persistent | Settings → Personalization → Memory → Add memory (app or browser) |
| Gemini | ✅ Persistent | Settings → Extensions & Personalization → About you |
| Microsoft Copilot | ✅ Persistent | Settings → Account → Privacy → Personalization and memory |
| Claude Code | ✅ Persistent | Paste into CLAUDE.md in your project root |
| OpenClaw | ✅ Persistent | Add to persona/memory context during onboarding |
| Grok | ⚡ Session only | Paste at start of each conversation |
| Perplexity | ⚡ Session only | Paste at start of each conversation |
| Perplexity Computer | ⚡ Session only | High token burn — consider higher quota |
| DeepSeek | ⚡ Session only | Paste at start of each conversation |
| Claude Cowork | ⚡ Session only | Paste at start of each session |
| Ernie Bot (Baidu) | ⚡ Session only | Paste at start of each conversation |
| HyperCLOVA X (Naver) | ⚡ Session only | Paste at start of each conversation |
~100ml of water consumed per 1,000 tokens processed.
Derived from data center power usage effectiveness (PUE) data and cooling water intensity ratios for major US cloud providers. Directional estimate — actual consumption varies by provider, region, season, and model architecture.
Sources:
- Li, P. et al. (2023). "Making AI Less Thirsty." UC Riverside. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271
- Luccioni, A.S. et al. (2023). "Power Hungry Processing." https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16863
- Microsoft 2022 Environmental Sustainability Report
- Google 2022 Environmental Report
If the math is wrong, open an issue and cite your source.
This is not an app about guilt. Guilt doesn't change behavior.
The Opower experiment sent households a simple letter: here's your energy use, here's your neighbor's. No moral lecture. Just a comparison. It drove a 2% national reduction in household energy consumption.
TokenWater runs the same mechanic. "You used 34% fewer tokens than the average user this week" is more effective than any environmental messaging. The comparison is built in.
Single HTML file. Zero dependencies. MIT licensed. You do not need to be a developer.
Highest priority:
- Phase 2 platform connectors — If you use Mistral, Cohere, Qwen, or Groq, open an issue with the API response format and the token field names. That's the whole spec.
- Better water math — Per-provider PUE and water intensity data. Open a PR against METHODOLOGY.md with a source.
- Browser extension — Auto-captures token counts without manual entry. Highest-leverage expansion.
- Translations — Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi are highest priority.
- Cloudflare Worker — Community impact counter backend. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
- No frameworks. Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.
- No server. Everything runs client-side.
- localStorage only. API keys never leave your browser.
- Single file. Fork it, host it on GitHub Pages in 5 minutes.
- MIT licensed. Take it, improve it, redistribute it.
Built by Ryan Lester — Navy veteran, economics student at the University of Houston, foresight researcher. TokenWater started as a thought experiment about invisible infrastructure costs and became a tool because nothing like it existed.
Essays on systems, power, and the future: RLPerspectives.com
MIT licensed. Take it. Make it better. The water is still being used whether you track it or not.
v1.0 — MIT License — rlperspectives.com