I accidentally burned $27 in LLM tokens during a single debugging session

I was debugging an LLM tool a few weeks ago and something weird happened. Nothing broke. No errors. Responses looked normal. But when I checked usage later, I had burned $27 in tokens during what I thought was a quick debugging session. The reason was simple: I had no visibility into token usage while I was actually developing. The typical workflow with LLM APIs looks like this: write prompt run request check response repeat But token usage is basically invisible in that loop. You usually only see it: • later in dashboards • inside logs • after the fact in billing Which means when you're experimenting, it’s very easy to burn tokens without realizing it. Especially when you’re: • testing prompts • looping requests • running agents • debugging API calls After running into this a few times I wanted something extremely simple: a live token counter while I'm coding. Something like how your Mac shows CPU usage or battery percentage. So I built a small macOS menu bar tool that shows token usa