The first version of TokenBar was wrong

A few weeks ago I got hit with an AI bill that was way higher than I expected.

That part was real, and it was annoying enough that I started building TokenBar.

But the more useful founder lesson came right after.

My first instinct was to build a dashboard.

Graphs. Session history. Cost breakdowns. Filters. A proper "AI usage center."

Classic solo dev mistake: I started building the thing that looked impressive instead of the thing I actually needed.

What I actually wanted was stupidly simple.

I wanted to glance at my screen while using Claude Code or other AI tools and immediately know:

• how many tokens I was burning
• roughly what that meant in dollars
• whether I should keep going or kill the session

That is it.

Not another tab.
Not another web app.
Not another analytics product I had to remember to open.

I wanted the answer in the menu bar.

That decision changed the whole product.

Once I stopped pretending this needed to be a giant platform, TokenBar got better fast.

The product became more honest.

It is a small Mac app for a very specific pain: AI costs feel fake until they are suddenly not fake anymore.

Most of us do not need deeper analytics first.
We need visibility first.

That was the real lesson for me building a Mac app as a solo founder.

Native apps force better product decisions sometimes.

On the web, it is too easy to hide weak product thinking behind more pages, more dashboards, and more settings.
On macOS, especially in the menu bar, you are forced to answer a brutal question:

Why does this deserve to exist all day on someone's computer?

If the answer is weak, the app feels weak immediately.

TokenBar only started to click when I had a clear answer:
this deserves to exist because AI pricing is weird, easy to ignore, and expensive to learn the hard way.

Another mistake I made was assuming lower price automatically means easier sales.

I priced TokenBar at $5 lifetime because I wanted the purchase to feel like a no-brainer.
Maybe that is right, maybe it is too cheap, but pricing taught me something important too:
cheap does not save a confusing product.

If people do not instantly understand the pain, $5 is still too much.
If they do understand the pain, you do not need a 20-paragraph pricing page.

So the loop now is simple:

1. find one painful moment
2. build the smallest possible fix
3. make the value obvious in under 10 seconds
4. stop adding features that mainly make me feel smart

I still like building bigger systems.
Every dev does.
But bigger is usually me procrastinating on clarity.

If you are building an AI tool right now, my honest advice is this:
charge less attention before you charge money.

Do not ask users to learn a workflow just to understand your value.
Put the value where they are already looking.

That is the entire reason TokenBar exists now.

If you want to see what I ended up shipping, it is here: tokenbar.site

Would love to hear what product you made simpler after overbuilding the first version.