TokenBar
AI Usage Tracker for Mac Menu Bar
Yesterday I launched a small tool I built called TokenBar, and I honestly didn’t expect much from the launch.
But within the first day it ended up getting 100+ installs, which was pretty surprising for such a small utility.
The idea came from a problem I kept running into while building with the OpenAI and Claude APIs.
During development, token usage is basically invisible.
You write prompts, run requests, test things, debug agents… and everything looks fine. Then later you check your usage and realize you burned way more tokens than you expected.
Dashboards and logs help, but they only show you things after the fact.
What I really wanted was something simple that shows token usage while I'm actually coding.
So I built TokenBar, a small macOS menu bar utility that displays token usage in real time when you're working with LLM APIs.
The idea is basically to treat token usage like a system metric — something you can glance at quickly while developing.
A few things I focused on when building it:
• extremely lightweight
• simple menu bar UI
• real-time token visibility
• no complicated dashboards
• one-time purchase ($5)
I posted it yesterday and ended up getting over 100 installs pretty quickly.
Still early, but it’s been interesting seeing how other developers are using it during prompt experimentation and LLM debugging.
If anyone here builds tools with LLM APIs, I’d be curious:
How do you currently keep track of token usage during development?
If you want to see what I built, it’s here:
Would love feedback or suggestions for improving it.
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