I opened an AI invoice recently and had the familiar solo founder reaction: not panic, just a slow sink in my stomach.
It was not some absurd bill. It was believable. The kind of bill that makes you think, maybe I was using the tools a lot this month, and then you move on. That is exactly why it is dangerous.
The real problem with AI spend is not the total. It is the delay between the work and the cost.
If you only see the number at the end of the month, you are not managing usage. You are managing regret. By then the waste is already baked in. You do not remember which sessions were useful, which ones were sloppy, and which model switch was worth it.
That is the gap TokenBar is meant to close.
I built it because I wanted cost visibility where the work actually happens: in the menu bar, live, while I am still deciding what to do next.
TokenBar is intentionally boring:
- It lives quietly in macOS
- It shows live token usage and cost while you work
- It makes overuse visible early enough to change behavior
That sounds small. It is not.
Visibility changes behavior fast. When the number is always there, a few things happen:
- You catch runaway sessions before they get expensive
- You stop using premium models for tasks that do not need them
- You think twice before sending a lazy prompt just to see what happens
That last one matters more than people admit.
A lot of AI spend is not one giant bad decision. It is death by a thousand tiny prompts. Rewording the same paragraph three times. Debugging the same issue five times. Asking a model to do work you could have done faster yourself, just because the cost was invisible in the moment.
That is why I do not think of TokenBar as a finance tool. It is a behavior tool.
It gives you a small, immediate signal so you can make a better decision before the session turns dumb.
That is the whole idea behind it: show just enough signal to make bad habits obvious.
If you build with AI every day, you probably do not need another dashboard you will check later. You need a tiny warning in the place where you are already working.
That is what I wanted, so I built it.
If you want the same thing, TokenBar is here: https://tokenbar.site
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