A few months into using LLMs every day, I noticed the same stupid pattern.
The tools felt cheap until the bill arrived.
That is a bad way to run a business. It is also a bad way to work solo, because costs only show up after you have already burned them.
That is why I built TokenBar.
TokenBar lives in the menu bar and shows real-time token usage and cost while you work. No dashboard hunt. No end-of-month surprise. Just a simple number that tells you what you are spending before the spend gets out of hand.
What I wanted was not another analytics product. I wanted cost visibility at the moment of use.
The bigger lesson: if a workflow can quietly waste money, it will.
That is true for AI tokens, and it is true for attention too. Monk Mode exists for the same reason in a different form: remove the noise that drains you before you notice it.
If you use LLMs enough to care about spend, build visibility into the workflow itself. If you work in a noisy browser, remove the feeds that steal your focus.
The fix is usually not more discipline. It is better defaults.
TokenBar: https://tokenbar.site
Top comments (0)