I was using AI tools hard enough to get a surprise bill, and the annoying part was not the bill itself. It was not knowing where the spend came from.
I kept opening chats and wondering:
- Which prompt is burning tokens?
- Did that long context window actually help?
- Did I just pay for a loop I did not need?
So I built TokenBar, a tiny menu bar app that shows token usage in real time.
The point is not to make AI usage scary. It is to make it visible.
A few things I learned building it solo:
- Invisible costs get ignored until they hurt
- Small tools work when they remove one sharp pain
- I care more about constant awareness than perfect dashboards
TokenBar is for people who use LLMs all day and want to keep an eye on usage without breaking flow.
If you have ever looked at an AI bill and thought, wait, what happened here, that was the moment for me too.
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