Ever noticed how quickly your AI API bills pile up when sending heavily nested JSON payloads? A few months ago, I was working on a project that required passing complex, structured data to an LLM. The token usage was unexpectedly high, and after analyzing the request logs, the primary culprit was obvious: the standard JSON format itself. All those repetitive quotes, curly braces, colons, and whitespace characters were eating into my context window and artificially inflating my API budget. That's when I began investigating TOON—a more compact data representation format that strips away the structural bloat of JSON while retaining the underlying relationships in the data. However, the ecosystem around it surprised me. The reliable tools available for converting JSON to TOON were often hidden behind enterprise SaaS paywalls, bundled into expensive developer suites, or offered free tiers with aggressively strict usage limits.…