diff --git a/litellm/utils.py b/litellm/utils.py
index 88b952031..fa15b73c2 100644
--- a/litellm/utils.py
+++ b/litellm/utils.py
@@ -3597,6 +3597,8 @@ def token_counter(
             raise ValueError("text and messages cannot both be None")
     elif isinstance(text, List):
         text = "".join(t for t in text if isinstance(t, str))
+    elif isinstance(text, str):
+        count_response_tokens = True  # user just trying to count tokens for a text. don't add the chat_ml +3 tokens to this
 
     if model is not None:
         tokenizer_json = _select_tokenizer(model=model)