I was debugging an LLM tool a few weeks ago and something weird happened.
Nothing broke.
No errors.
Responses looked normal.
But when I checked usage later, I had burned $27 in tokens during what I thought was a quick debugging session.
The reason was simple: I had no visibility into token usage while I was actually developing.
The typical workflow with LLM APIs looks like this:
write prompt
run request
check response
repeat
But token usage is basically invisible in that loop.
You usually only see it:
• later in dashboards
• inside logs
• after the fact in billing
Which means when you're experimenting, it’s very easy to burn tokens without realizing it.
Especially when you’re:
• testing prompts
• looping requests
• running agents
• debugging API calls
After running into this a few times I wanted something extremely simple:
a live token counter while I'm coding.
Something like how your Mac shows CPU usage or battery percentage.
So I built a small macOS menu bar tool that shows token usage in real time while you're working with OpenAI or Claude APIs.
No dashboards.
No analytics platform.
Just a small number in the menu bar showing how many tokens are being used.
It ended up being way more useful than I expected, especially during prompt experiments.
If anyone here builds with LLM APIs and has had similar “wait how many tokens did that use?” moments, you can check it out here:
Also curious how other people monitor token usage during development. Logs? Custom tooling? Something else?
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