Last winter I kept doing the same stupid thing: I would only look at my AI spend after the bill landed.
That works fine until it doesn't.
A model call feels tiny in the moment. A few prompts here, a few refactors there, a tab left open while you answer Slack, and suddenly the total jumps in a way that makes no sense when you are staring at it three weeks later.
I got tired of finding out too late. I did not need another dashboard. I needed a warning light.
That was the whole idea behind TokenBar. I wanted the number sitting where I already live all day, in the menu bar, so I could see the cost before it turned into an expensive surprise. No separate tab. No weekly ritual. Just a live read on what my coding was doing.
The weird part is how fast it changed my behavior. Once I could see token usage in real time, I stopped treating AI like free autocomplete and started treating it like a resource with a meter on it. I made smaller requests. I noticed when one workflow was burning way more than it should. I caught the expensive stuff while it was still cheap to fix.
That is why I built tokenbar.site. Not because I wanted another productivity app, but because I was sick of waiting for a monthly report to tell me what my own editor had been doing for days.
If you use AI heavily, the bill is not really the problem. The delay is.
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