Let me list every AI coding tool I use and what happens when you hit their rate limit:
- Claude Pro/Max: You get a message saying you've exceeded your usage. No countdown. No estimate of when it resets. Just... stopped.
- Cursor: A modal pops up telling you you've used your "fast" requests. Switches to slow mode. No visibility into how many you have left until it happens.
- GitHub Copilot: You don't even know there's a limit until completions just... stop coming. No warning.
- Codex: Usage counter buried in settings. You have to manually check.
- Gemini: Different limits for different models. Some daily, some per-minute. Good luck keeping track.
- OpenRouter: Credit-based. Burns faster on some models than others. Dashboard exists but you're not going to check it mid-coding session.
See the pattern? Every single one of these tools has rate limits. None of them make it easy to see where you stand in real time.
The Actual Problem
If you use one AI tool, this is annoying but manageable. You learn the rhythm — roughly how much you can use before getting cut off.
But in 2026, most developers aren't using one AI tool. They're using three, four, five+. And each one has:
- Different limit types (requests, tokens, credits, time-based)
- Different reset schedules (daily, weekly, monthly, rolling window)
- Different dashboards (or no dashboard at all)
- Different billing models
The mental overhead of tracking all this is enormous. And the failure mode is always the same: you're deep in a coding session, in flow, making progress — and suddenly your primary tool stops working. Now you're context-switching, checking dashboards, trying to figure out which tool still has capacity.
That context switch costs you 15-30 minutes every time. Multiple that by 2-3 times per week and you're losing hours of peak productivity every month.
What I Wanted
I wanted a single place — always visible, zero effort — that shows me:
- Current usage across all my AI providers
- How much capacity I have left on each
- When each limit resets
- Whether I'm burning too fast or have room to spare
- All of this in my menu bar, glanceable
What I Found
TokenBar does exactly this. It's a macOS menu bar app that monitors your usage across 20+ AI providers in real time.
The key features that matter for developers:
Pace Intelligence
This is the killer feature. TokenBar tells you if you're on pace, in deficit, or have reserve capacity for each provider. At 2 PM on a Wednesday, you can glance at your menu bar and know whether to keep using Claude or switch to GPT-4 for the rest of the day.
Reset Countdowns
You see exactly when each provider's limits reset. No more guessing, no more checking dashboards.
Multi-Provider View
Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot, Codex, Gemini, OpenRouter, Warp AI, JetBrains AI, Kimi — all in one view. I currently track 6 providers and the unified view alone saved my sanity.
CLI Integration
It ships with a tokenbar CLI. I wrote a shell alias that checks my Claude capacity before starting a long coding agent session:
alias codecheck='tokenbar status claude && echo "Ready to code"'
Local & Private
No cloud account. No telemetry. Everything runs on your machine. For developers who care about privacy (all of us?), this matters.
The Price
$4.99. One time. Not a subscription.
For context, I was spending $200+/month on AI tools and regularly losing productivity to surprise rate limits. $4.99 to see everything in one place was the easiest purchase decision I've made this year.
The Actual Impact
After two weeks of using it:
- Zero surprise rate limits. I can see them coming and switch tools proactively.
- Cancelled one subscription I realized I barely used (visible in the usage data).
- Better model selection. When I can see capacity across providers, I make smarter choices about which model to use for what.
- Less context switching. No more opening 4 dashboards to figure out what's available.
If you're a developer using multiple AI tools on macOS, check it out: tokenbar.site — $4.99, one-time, 20+ providers.
Your flow state will thank you.
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