
I built a Mac app after getting surprised by my Claude bill
A few months back I got my monthly API bill and felt sick. I had been vibe-coding pretty hard with Claude, and I knew it wasn't going to be zero. But the number was way higher than I expected. Like, embarrassingly higher. I had been running Claude Code sessions back to back, long context windows, lots of tool calls, and I had no idea how fast it was adding up. The worst part? I couldn't have known. There's no live feedback. You just work, and then you find out later. So I did what most developers do when something annoys them enough. I built a tool to fix it. What I made TokenBar is a macOS menu bar app that tracks your AI token usage in real time. It sits in your menu bar the whole time you're working and shows you your spend as it happens, not after. It works with Claude API, OpenAI, and a few others. You paste in your API key, and from that point on you can see tokens and cost right there in the menu bar while you code. No dashboards to switch to. No end-of-month surprises. Just a n
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