RAraaihank·Feb 4, 2026Submission
We added TOON compression to our LLM gateway – compress prompts, saves tokens
1 points · Open discussiontoon-format
toon
TypeScript2025–2026
toon-format / toon
toon
🎒 Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON) – compact, human-readable serialization of JSON data for LLM prompts. TypeScript SDK, CLI, benchmarks.
17Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
25.6KGitHub stars
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What it is
🎒 Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON) – compact, human-readable serialization of JSON data for LLM prompts. TypeScript SDK, CLI, benchmarks.
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:49:33 PM UTC.
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Mentions over time
HN mentions by month18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2025-10-26 22:19:02 UTC to 2026-06-18 18:13:41 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2025 | 2025-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| Nov 2025 | 2025-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 4 | 1 |
| Dec 2025 | 2025-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2026 | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Feb 2026 | 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Mar 2026 | 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Apr 2026 | 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| May 2026 | 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Jun 2026 | 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesCostbase is an LLM cost optimization proxy. We just shipped TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) compression.
TOON is an open format (not ours): https://github.com/toon-format/toon
It converts JSON like this:
{"id": "cust_001", "name": "Acme", "mrr": 15000}
Into:
id: cust_001
name: Acme
mrr: 15000
We integrated it into our gateway to automatically compress JSON in tool results, user messages, and tool call arguments before they hit the LLM.
Benchmarks on real payloads:
- CRM query (10 records): 48% tokens saved
- E-commerce orders (4 orders): 34% saved
- API metrics (8 endpoints): 43% saved
Sub-100μs latency overhead. LLMs parse it correctly in our testing (GPT-4o, Claude, etc).
Not a silver bullet — works best on arrays of objects with uniform schemas. Deeply nested or irregular JSON sees less benefit.
Curious what stra
Read the rest
tegies others use for token compression. We considered CSV for tabular data but it doesn't handle nested structures.
https://www.costbase.ai