Last winter I did the dumb thing every solo dev does: I told myself I would "keep an eye on" my AI spend.
That lasted until the bill stopped being a curiosity and became a real line item.
I wasn't building a giant team dashboard. I was just trying to ship TokenBar, a tiny macOS menu bar app that shows LLM token usage in real time. The irony is pretty good: I built software to make AI cost visible because I kept losing track of my own AI cost.
What changed wasn't the total number. It was the feeling.
Before I could see usage as I worked, every prompt felt free. Every refactor felt small. Every "one more try" felt harmless. Then I started watching tokens accumulate while I coded, and the whole thing snapped into focus. The expensive part of AI isn't usually one giant request. It's the dozen little ones you forget about.
That is why TokenBar exists at tokenbar.site.
I didn't want another dashboard I would only check after the damage was done. I wanted the number where I already live: in the menu bar, right next to the rest of the signals I watch all day.
The first version was almost embarrassingly simple. No predictions. No charts trying to look smarter than they are. Just live token usage, clear enough to make me pause before I fire off a sloppy prompt.
And honestly, that pause matters.
It made me better at using AI without turning me into a spreadsheet person. It made me notice which tasks were cheap and which ones were quietly eating my budget. It made me stop treating context like an infinite resource.
The weird part is that this is not really a tooling problem. It's a behavior problem. Most of us do not need another AI product. We need a faster way to notice when the bill is rising.
So yeah, I built a menu bar app because I wanted to see the truth sooner.
If you're a solo dev using Claude, ChatGPT, or anything else that bills by usage, you probably already know the feeling. The bill is never the surprise. The surprise is how long you went without looking.
If that sounds familiar, that's exactly the problem TokenBar is for.
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