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.
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