# The Cost of Chain-of-Thought: "Think Step by Step" Can Inflate Your Bill 3-10×

> Source: https://sukruyusufkaya.com/en/learn/token-ekonomisi/chain-of-thought-maliyeti-cot-tradeoff
> Updated: 2026-05-14T14:44:12.936Z
> Category: Token Ekonomisi & LLM Cost Optimization
> Module: Module 5: The Cost Dimension of Prompt Engineering
**TLDR:** CoT (chain-of-thought) prompting improves accuracy by 20-40% in some tasks. But it inflates output tokens 3-10×. This lesson covers CoT cost vs accuracy across 5 task types and when to use it.