Last month I opened an AI bill and felt that very specific founder panic: the kind that happens when usage spikes faster than your intuition.
It was not the dollar amount that bothered me. It was the lack of clarity.
I knew I was spending more, but I could not answer the simple question:
How much am I using, right now, and what is it costing me?
That was the seed for TokenBar.
I wanted a tiny menu bar app that keeps cost visible in real time. No dashboards to dig through. No guessing. Just a constant, honest number sitting where I could see it while I work.
The reason is simple: awareness changes behavior.
If cost is invisible, you ignore it until the bill arrives.
If cost is visible, you start making better decisions in the moment.
That same idea shows up everywhere in shipping:
- make the important thing impossible to miss
- remove the delay between action and feedback
- design for behavior, not just information
TokenBar is my attempt to do that for AI spend.
If you are building with APIs or agents and want a cleaner sense of what they are costing you, this is for you.
I built it because I was tired of discovering the problem after the damage was done.
TokenBar: https://tokenbar.site
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