I built TokenBar because I kept getting surprised by my AI spend.
Not by some giant enterprise bill. By small daily drift. A few tabs here, a few prompts there, and suddenly the cost was real enough to make me stop and look at it.
What surprised me was this: the invoice was not the whole problem. The bigger problem was that I had no visibility while I was working. If I do not feel the cost in the moment, I keep using the thing until it gets ugly.
That is what TokenBar is for. I wanted a tiny signal in my menu bar that makes the cost hard to ignore without getting in the way.
As a solo dev, I keep learning the same lesson in different forms:
- make the tradeoff visible
- reduce friction where it matters
- build for the moment of decision, not the dashboard later
I do not think every tool needs a meter. But when usage can quietly drift, visibility changes behavior.
That has been true for AI spend. It is also true for attention.
Top comments (1)
This is exactly the part most AI cost dashboards miss. The invoice is too late to change behavior. What I like about TokenBar is that it puts the signal where the work is happening, so the cost feels real while you are still deciding whether to send another prompt.
I would be curious how you think about the threshold for showing the signal. If it is too noisy, people tune it out. If it is too quiet, they never notice the drift. That balance feels like the whole product.
For anyone who keeps getting surprised by Claude, Cursor, or API spend, this looks like a smart tiny utility rather than another dashboard.