DEV Community: Henry Godnick

The AI bill that made me build TokenBar

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:14:57 +0000

A few months ago I opened an AI bill that was bigger than it should have been.

Nothing was technically broken. That was the annoying part.

The problem was visibility. I could not tell what I was spending until after I had already spent it. By then the only option was to stare at the number and promise myself I would be more careful next month.

That is a terrible workflow.

So I built TokenBar.

TokenBar lives in the macOS menu bar and shows what is happening in real time. The point is not to make AI usage scary. The point is to make it visible while you are still making decisions.

That change matters.

When costs are hidden, people guess. When people guess, they overspend or underuse good tools because they do not trust the number.

I wanted a tiny tool that made the tradeoff obvious without getting in the way.

If you use AI every day and want cost visibility without opening another dashboard, TokenBar is for you.

The $1,200 AI bill that made me build TokenBar

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:06:17 +0000

I got hit with a $1,200 AI bill and my first thought was not "wow, great growth". It was "this is out of control."

I was using AI every day while building, but I had almost no feel for where the cost was coming from. The bill was high enough to be annoying and vague enough to be worse.

That is why I built TokenBar. Not to optimize for the sake of optimizing. Just to make the cost visible in real time, right in the menu bar, so I could stop guessing.

A lot of founder tools start as a pain you keep ignoring until it gets expensive enough to fix. This was one of those.

If you are building with AI and you have no idea what each day is costing you, that is a bad place to stay for long.

The AI bill was the first thing that made me build TokenBar

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:44:30 +0000

A few months ago I opened my AI bill and felt stupid.

Not because I used AI. Because I had no real feel for what I was spending.

The number kept climbing across tools, subscriptions, and little usage spikes. I could tell you the price of each app, but not the total cost of my workflow.

That gap is annoying when you are solo. You feel it late, after the bill lands.

That is why I built TokenBar.

It lives in the menu bar and keeps cost visible while I work. No dashboard hunting. No mental math. Just a quick reality check on what my AI usage is doing.

The lesson for me was simple:

If a cost matters, make it visible where the work happens.

TokenBar is for people who want that visibility without adding another tab to babysit.

If you have ever been surprised by an AI bill, you probably know the feeling.

Monk Mode: the mac app that blocks the feeds that eat your day

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:10:36 +0000

I made Monk Mode because the real problem is not apps, it's the default surfaces that pull you into scrolling.

Monk Mode blocks the specific stuff that turns a quick check into a lost hour:

YouTube Home
YouTube Shorts
X For You
Reddit front pages
other feed-style distractions

It is a Mac app, lifetime license, $15.

If you are trying to ship more and scroll less, this is for you: https://mac.monk-mode.lifestyle

I am curious what feed or distraction you would want blocked first.

I Stopped Treating AI Spend Like a Background Process

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:02:33 +0000

I used to treat AI spend like a monthly bill.

That was the mistake.

A monthly bill is something you inspect after the damage is already done. It arrives politely, with line items and a due date and just enough time to feel annoyed before you pay it. AI spend is not like that. It is more like a background process. It runs while you are coding. It runs while you are debugging. It runs while you are telling yourself, "I'll check later."

I learned that the hard way while building TokenBar.

I had the usual setup: a few models, a few tabs, a little too much confidence. I would open Claude or ChatGPT, ask for help, keep moving, and assume the cost was small enough to ignore. Then I'd look up later and realize I had spent another chunk of money without ever feeling the moment it happened.

That feeling is weirdly common for solo devs. You don't get a dramatic cloud bill explosion. You get a slow leak. A few dollars here, a few dollars there, and then one day you realize the product you built to move faster is also making your spending harder to see.

I didn't want another dashboard. Dashboards are where visibility goes to die. They are useful when you want a report. They are useless when you want a warning.

So I built TokenBar: tokenbar.site

The point was simple. Put the number where I already look. Right in the menu bar. Make it feel like battery life. Make it feel like temperature. Make it impossible to pretend I didn't know.

That changed how I work.

The first surprising thing was not that I spent less. It was that I started making better decisions before I started typing.

If I saw usage climbing, I would stop and ask: do I really need to paste this whole file? Can I narrow the prompt? Do I need the most expensive model for this? Sometimes the answer was yes. A lot of the time it was no, and the menu bar told me that before I had already burned the tokens.

The second surprising thing was psychological.

When AI spend is invisible, it feels abstract. When it's visible, it feels like part of the craft. You start noticing the cost of context. You start noticing the cost of retrying the same request three times because you were sloppy the first time. You start noticing that "just one more prompt" is never just one more prompt.

That has been the real lesson for me: the cost is not just the bill. It's the drift.

It's the drift between what you think you are spending and what you are actually spending.
It's the drift between "I'll keep an eye on it" and "I should have caught this yesterday."
It's the drift between a tool that helps you move faster and a tool that quietly becomes part of your overhead.

TokenBar exists because I wanted to collapse that drift.

Not with more analytics. Not with another beautiful graph. Just with a live, visible number in the place my brain already checks without thinking.

If you are building with AI and your costs still feel fuzzy, I get it. It is easy to ignore because the pain is delayed. But delayed pain is still pain. And for solo devs, ignoring it is expensive in the most annoying way possible: it feels small until it isn't.

I don't think every developer needs a token counter. I do think every developer needs a better relationship with what their AI usage is actually costing them.

That is why I built TokenBar.

If you want to try it, it's at tokenbar.site.

I built TokenBar because AI bills got stupid fast

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:09:14 +0000

I kept getting surprised by how fast Claude and Cursor usage could turn into real money.

So I built TokenBar, a tiny macOS menu bar app that shows live AI token usage while you work.

It is not trying to be a dashboard or another analytics rabbit hole. It is just a quick way to see what your AI tools are actually costing you before the monthly bill lands.

If you use Claude, Cursor, or any other token-heavy workflow and you want a simple guardrail, TokenBar is $5 lifetime:

https://tokenbar.site

Would love feedback from people who are actually watching their AI spend.

The $1,200 AI bill that made me build TokenBar

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:14:05 +0000

Last month I looked at an AI bill and realized I had no clean answer to one simple question: where was the money actually going? Not the total. The actual usage by app, by minute, by habit.

That gap is what pushed me to build TokenBar.

I wanted something that lives in the menu bar and tells me what I am spending on LLMs in real time. Not a dashboard I will forget to open later. Not a spreadsheet I will update on a good day. Just a constant, honest readout while I work.

The lesson was embarrassing but useful: small recurring costs are easy to ignore until they become a monthly ambush. AI tools make it even easier because the spend feels tied to productivity. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is just drift.

TokenBar is my attempt to make the drift visible.

If you are a solo dev or a small team shipping with Claude, Cursor, or other AI tools, cost visibility matters. You cannot optimize what you are not watching.

If you want to see it, TokenBar is here: https://tokenbar.site

I am still building in public, still learning the hard way, and still trying to keep the product brutally simple.

I cut my Claude Code waste by 30% with one tiny menu bar tool

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:09:07 +0000

If you use Claude Code, OpenClaw, or Codex daily, token usage gets expensive fast and most of us have no live visibility while we work.

I built TokenBar for that exact pain: a lightweight macOS menu bar app that shows token usage in real time while you code.

What changed for me:

I stopped over-prompting and started batching asks
I could see which sessions were silently expensive
I made better model routing decisions earlier

If you are deep in AI-assisted dev and want cost awareness without dashboards, this is a simple add-on.

Price: $5 lifetime
Site: https://tokenbar.site

Happy to share a setup screenshot if useful.

The day my AI bill punched me in the face

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:43:14 +0000

Last month I opened an AI bill and had that quiet founder moment where you realize the problem is not theory anymore.

It was real money, real waste, and it was coming from my own product and workflow.

The part that bothered me most was not the total. It was how invisible it had become.

A few things were quietly driving the bill up:

duplicate loops
overly expensive models on simple tasks
retries that looked harmless in the moment
enough small usage spikes to hide the damage until the invoice arrived

That is why I built TokenBar.

I wanted a dead simple way to see token usage and cost in real time, right where I work. Not after the month ended. Not in some dashboard I will check later. Right now.

The lesson is bigger than AI costs.

If you cannot see what something is costing you, you will overuse it.
That applies to money. It applies to focus. It applies to attention.

The same instinct is behind Monk Mode too. Remove the noise. Make the cost of distraction visible. Make the right behavior easier.

If you are shipping with AI every day, audit your usage early. The bill is never just a bill. It is feedback.

TokenBar helps me catch the spikes before they snowball.

If this is your pain too, you are not alone.

I built a Mac app that blocks YouTube Home, Shorts, X For You, and Reddit front pages

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:10:03 +0000

I made Monk Mode, a macOS app for people who keep losing 5 minutes to “just checking” feeds.

It blocks the stuff that quietly eats your day:

YouTube Home
YouTube Shorts
X For You
Reddit front pages
other feed-style distraction pages

It stays out of the way until you need it, then gets strict when you try to open the rabbit hole.

I built it because I kept noticing that the real problem was not work, it was feeds. Once the feed is gone, getting back to work is a lot easier.

Monk Mode is a one-time $15 app for Mac.

Site: https://mac.monk-mode.lifestyle

If you care about attention, focus, or shipping more and doomscrolling less, I’d love feedback from people actually using a Mac for deep work.

I Started Checking My AI Spend Like a Pulse, Not a Receipt

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:02:23 +0000

A few months ago, I thought I had a pretty normal relationship with AI tools.

I’d open Claude, ask it to help me move faster, pay the bill at the end of the month, and move on.

That lasted exactly until I had one of those moments where the number was small enough to ignore, but annoying enough to stick in my head. Not catastrophic. Just enough to make me realize I was treating AI spend like a receipt from a nice dinner instead of a live input to my work.

That was the real problem.

The bill was never the hard part. The hard part was the silence before it showed up.

If I’m being honest, I don’t want another dashboard telling me what already happened. I want a warning light. Something that lives where I work, not somewhere I remember to check once I’m already over the edge.

So I built TokenBar.

It sits in my menu bar and keeps AI usage visible while I’m actually coding. Not after the fact. Not in a spreadsheet. Right there, like battery life or Wi‑Fi. If I’m burning through tokens too fast, I see it while I’m still in the flow and can make a smarter call.

That changed how I work more than I expected.

I’m more careful about when I paste giant context blocks. I notice when I’m about to ask an AI to do something I could solve myself in two minutes. And when I do want to go bigger, I can do it on purpose instead of accidentally drifting into a bill I didn’t mean to create.

I built it because AI costs are not a monthly reporting problem. They’re a live attention problem.

That’s also why I made TokenBar public at https://tokenbar.site — because I think a lot more solo devs are going to hit this exact wall once AI stops being a novelty and starts becoming part of the daily stack.

I don’t think the future of AI billing is a prettier invoice.

I think it’s making the cost visible at the moment of use.

And honestly, that feels a lot more honest.

The $400 AI bill that made me build TokenBar

Henry Godnick — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:31:01 +0000

I did not build TokenBar because I love menu bar widgets.

I built it because I kept getting surprised by AI usage costs.

A prompt here, a few retries there, a bigger model on a task that did not need one, and suddenly the bill looked nothing like the thing I had in my head.

What changed things for me was simple visibility. If I can see what is happening in real time, I make better calls:

I notice waste faster
I stop guessing about usage
I can choose a cheaper model when the task is simple
I feel less blind when the bill arrives

TokenBar is my attempt to make token usage feel like something you can actually watch instead of something you discover later in an invoice.

I am still a solo dev shipping this in public, and the main lesson so far is that small feedback loops beat heroics.

If you are building with AI and getting surprised by costs, the problem may not be the invoice. It may be the lack of visibility.