A few weeks ago I caught myself doing the thing I hate most as a solo dev: pretending a problem was "under control" because I had a rough idea of the numbers.
I was shipping fast, using Claude for coding help, and checking usage only when I remembered. That works right up until it doesn't. One day the bill is fine, the next day you notice you've burned way more than you expected and you have no clue when it happened.
That was the moment I stopped thinking about AI costs like a monthly statement.
Monthly reports are too slow for a problem that changes while you're actively working. I don't need another dashboard I can open later. I need a signal while I'm in the middle of building.
That's why I built TokenBar.
I wanted the cheapest possible place to show me the truth: the menu bar. Not a tab. Not a spreadsheet. Not a dashboard hidden behind three clicks. Just a live number sitting where my eyes already go all day.
Once it was there, the behavior changed immediately. I started noticing which tasks were expensive. I could tell when I was in a context-heavy loop. I could see the difference between a small edit and a long, wandering session that was quietly eating money.
That visibility matters because AI spend doesn't feel like cloud infra. It feels like nothing. You're just coding. Then the bill shows up and you realize the silence was the expensive part.
TokenBar lives at tokenbar.site if you want to see the approach I'm talking about. The point isn't "track everything forever." The point is to make AI usage visible enough that you can make better decisions in real time.
For me, that was the whole lesson: if the cost is happening live, the monitoring should too.
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