I used to open my editor and just start coding. Now the first thing I check is my token count.
That sounds ridiculous until you have one of those weeks where the AI is doing real work and your bill quietly turns into a mini gut punch. I had already been burned once by a surprise Claude bill, so I stopped treating tokens like some abstract backend metric and started treating them like a live resource I can actually feel.
That shift changed how I build.
A lot of the tools people use for AI work are dashboards. Big charts. Big graphs. Big everything. They look smart, but they are terrible when you are in the middle of shipping something alone and just need to know, right now, if your current prompt is about to get expensive.
That is why I built TokenBar.
I wanted something I could see without leaving my flow. A tiny menu bar app. No tab switch. No dashboard rabbit hole. Just the number, live, where I already am.
That sounds small, but it is the whole point. When you are a solo dev, every interruption costs more than the UI looks like it should. A menu bar app respects that. It sits there quietly and tells the truth.
The funny part is that once I started watching tokens in real time, I changed the way I wrote prompts. I got more ruthless about context. I stopped pasting entire conversations when I only needed the last two messages. I started noticing which tasks were cheap and which ones were secretly expensive.
That is the kind of thing no one thinks about until the bill shows up.
If you build with AI every day, you probably do not need another productivity dashboard. You need something that keeps you honest while you are actually working.
That is what I wanted TokenBar to be: a tiny signal in the corner of your screen that makes AI costs feel as real as memory pressure or disk space.
If that is a problem you have too, the project is here: tokenbar.site
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