# toon: 🎒 Token-Oriented Object Notation – JSON for LLMs at half the token cost

<https://github.com/johannschopplich/toon>

- Host: [github.com](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/github.com/)
- Saved: October 29, 2025 (2025-10-29T13:51:48Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d7d36c1f4421/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/d7d36c1f4421.json

## What Jamie wrote

Developers everywhere use JSON as the default way of handing data around including to LLMs. If you want proof of that take a look at the APIs for LLMs where you will find API methods to force the return message from the LLM to be JSON. This project was born out of a desire to be efficient with tokens and realized that you could format the data using a different style and get equally good results to JSON with approximately a 50% reduction in token consumption. Super interesting and for projects at scale could be a big deal.

## Facts

- Kind: [Repository](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/repository/)
- Repository: toon-format/toon: 🎒 Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON) – compact, human-readable serialization of JSON data for LLM prompts. TypeScript SDK, CLI, benchmarks.
- About the repository: TypeScript, 25,549 stars, MIT, last push October 9, 2026
- Homepage: <https://toonformat.dev>

## Appears in

- [WT331: Weekly Thing 331 / RFC, Security, Tokens](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/331/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://github.com/johannschopplich/toon