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.
Top comments (0)