I Built a Menu Bar App Because Dashboards Hide the Real Cost

I built TokenBar because I kept missing the moment the cost happened.

A dashboard tells you what happened yesterday. That is fine for reporting. It is bad for changing behavior.

The first time I noticed this, I was deep in a solo coding session and my AI usage was creeping up in the background. Nothing felt dangerous in the moment. I was just moving fast, asking one more question, shipping one more tweak, telling myself I would check the bill later.

Later is the problem.

By the time the number shows up in a dashboard, the decision is already over. You already paid for the extra context, the repeated prompts, the wasted iterations, the little habits that turn into a real bill. You do not get a chance to course-correct when it still matters.

That was the whole reason I wanted something sitting in the menu bar instead. Not another place to inspect after the fact. Something I could glance at while I was still in flow.

When the number is visible in the moment, it changes how you work. You start noticing the difference between "this prompt is useful" and "I am just looping." You feel the cost when you are about to create it, not after it has already landed on your card.

That is what TokenBar is for. It lives at tokenbar.site, and it exists because I wanted a brutally simple answer to a brutally simple question: what is this AI habit costing me right now?

I do not think most developers need another analytics dashboard. I think they need less distance between the action and the cost.

That small gap is where waste hides.