If you build anything with the OpenAI or Claude APIs, you've probably run into this at some point.
You're testing prompts, running scripts, tweaking things quickly… and suddenly you realize you have no real sense of how many tokens you're burning in real time.
You can check dashboards later, sure. But while you're actually developing, it's basically invisible. You run something, it works, and only later do you discover the cost.
I kept running into the same problem:
• running prompt experiments
• testing agents or scripts
• debugging API calls
and having no immediate visibility into token usage while coding.
Most tools that exist are either:
dashboards after the fact
logging solutions
full analytics platforms
But I just wanted something extremely simple: a tiny indicator that shows token usage while I'm working.
So I ended up building a small macOS menu bar tool that shows token usage in real time while you're developing.
No dashboards.
No analytics platform.
Just a token counter sitting in the menu bar.
If anyone else here builds with LLM APIs and finds themselves wondering “how many tokens did that just burn?”, I'm curious if something like this would actually be useful.
You can see it here:
https://tokenbar.site
Would also love feedback from anyone working heavily with the OpenAI or Claude APIs.
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