A month ago I opened an AI bill and felt that tiny stomach drop every solo dev knows.
Not because the number was catastrophic. Because I could not tell, in the moment, what was actually costing me money.
I was bouncing between Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and a few side experiments. One day I would feel efficient. The next day I would realize I had burned through a ton of tokens without a clear sense of where the waste was happening.
That is the kind of pain that is easy to ignore until it starts repeating.
So I built TokenBar.
TokenBar lives in the macOS menu bar and shows your token usage in real time. The point is not to shame you. The point is to make the invisible visible while you are still working.
When you can see the cost as you go, a few things change fast:
- you stop guessing about which workflow is expensive
- you notice when a prompt is too verbose
- you get a clearer feel for which model is worth it
- you make better decisions without opening a spreadsheet
That is the whole product idea: cost visibility for people shipping with AI every day.
I did not build TokenBar because I love dashboards. I built it because hidden costs are annoying, and annoying costs become real money when you are a solo developer trying to move fast.
If you are using AI heavily on macOS and want a simple way to keep an eye on usage, TokenBar is here: https://tokenbar.site
And if you have ever opened an AI bill and thought, wait, how did this happen, you already understand why I made it.
