I built TokenBar, a $5 lifetime Mac menu bar app that shows live AI token usage

Hey John, this is awesome! 🔥
I’ve been in the exact same boat — constantly getting surprised by Claude/Cursor token burn and wishing I had live visibility without switching tabs or checking invoices later. TokenBar looks super clean for that quick menu-bar glance on Mac.
I ended up building something a bit different but in the same spirit: TokenTelemetry — a completely free, 100% local & open-source dashboard (MIT licensed) that reads your agent logs in real time and shows token usage, reasoning traces, tool calls, and costs across Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, etc. No cloud, no signup, works on Mac/Linux/Windows.
Would love your thoughts on it!
tokentelemetry

Nice.

Seeing usage helps — the tricky part is that behavior can still become less consistent over time even when everything looks normal.

This is exactly the kind of tiny utility AI folks actually use. The menu bar is the right surface because token spend is something you want to notice before the invoice lands.

If you keep pushing this, I'd focus on one killer next step: a threshold alert when spend spikes on a model or project.

Nice — this is a genuinely clear “pain → micro-tool” build. Token cost visibility is one of those things people only care about after they’ve burned money once.

Curious, are you planning to expand this into alerts (like spend thresholds / anomaly spikes), or keeping it strictly as a passive visibility layer in the menu bar?

Also I’m running a small experiment with builders working on infra + devtools like this — $19 entry, winner gets a Tokyo trip (flights + hotel). Round 01 is live (100 cap).

That “guessing the bill” pain is real.

Curious — are people using it just for visibility, or actually changing behavior based on what they see?