DEV Community

Henry Godnick
Henry Godnick

Posted on

I built a macOS menu bar app to track AI token usage in real-time — TokenBar ($5 lifetime)

If you're a developer working with AI APIs, you know the pain: you're deep in a coding session, making calls to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and suddenly your monthly bill is 3x what you expected.

I got tired of the surprise bills, so I built TokenBar — a native macOS menu bar app that tracks your AI token usage in real-time.

What it does

TokenBar sits in your menu bar and gives you instant visibility into:

  • Real-time token counting across all major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.)
  • Cost tracking so you always know what you're spending
  • Per-provider breakdowns to see where your money is going
  • Zero friction — it just works in the background

Why I built this

As a solo developer using AI APIs daily, I was constantly getting blindsided by costs. Checking dashboards manually is annoying and always after-the-fact. I wanted something that lives in my menu bar and gives me a live view of what I'm burning through.

Pricing

$5 lifetime. One purchase, yours forever. No subscriptions, no upsells.

I priced it this way because:

  1. It's a utility — it should be cheap
  2. Subscriptions for a menu bar app feel wrong
  3. I'd rather have 1000 users at $5 than 50 at $10/month

Check it out

🔗 tokenbar.site

I'd love feedback from fellow devs who are burning through AI tokens. What features would make this a must-have for you?


Built as a native macOS app. SwiftUI. No Electron. Fast and lightweight.

Top comments (0)