I built an Token Reducer app in 60min, and I got $300+ MRR in two weeks

My Claude Code bill last month was embarrassing. Not "ouch" embarrassing — genuinely "staring at the invoice wondering what went wrong"

embarrassing.

The agents were working. They were also burning tokens like a furnace. Bloated prompts, repeated tool calls, zero visibility into which step cost what. I had no idea where the money was going and no way to stop it.

So I built Terse.

What it is

Terse is a floating macOS app that sits alongside Claude Code, Cursor, or ChatGPT and monitors your AI sessions in real time. It compresses your prompts before they're sent — stripping filler, hedging, and redundancy — and tracks token savings per tool call so you can see exactly what you're spending and where.

Three compression modes: Soft (just typos and whitespace), Normal (filler and phrase shortening), Aggressive (full compression including abbreviations). Works on 11 languages. Fully on-device, nothing sent to any server.

What I got wrong early

I built the optimizer first and the UI last. Big mistake. The compression engine worked great — 40–70% token reduction in testing — but no one could see the savings happening so it felt like nothing was happening. Adding the live dashboard changed retention overnight. People need to see the number going down.

I also shipped a Windows version nobody asked for before I'd talked to enough Mac users. Lesson learned.

Where it is now

The macOS app is at v1.3.1 with a pet animation system that reacts to your AI tool calls, along with windows app, chrome and vs code extension.— which sounds silly but users mention it in every review. The pet eats tokens. People love it.

Revenue is early. I'm not going to quote a number that isn't meaningful yet. But so far I got good early results. I got $324 MRR in 3 weeks

What's working

- Content targeting "reduce Claude Code costs" — organic traffic from developers actively searching for this

- Reddit posts in r/ClaudeAI and r/cursor — when genuine, not spammy, these convert

- The pet. Genuinely, the animated pet that celebrates your token savings is bringing people back.

What isn't

- Paid ads: burned budget, zero conversions, moved on

- Broad "AI productivity" positioning: nobody searches for that, switched to specific tool targeting

The thing I keep reminding myself

If you build for a specific, expensive, measurable problem — in this case developers paying per token — you don't need to convince anyone the problem exists. They already know. You just need to show up.

What's next

Aiming to get Terse in front of 1,000 active developers by Q3. Working on a Windows agent monitor and a VS Code extension.

If you're building tools for AI developers: what's your best channel for reaching them? Happy to compare notes.

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Terse is at terseai.org — free trial, no credit card.