Built TokenBar after one stupid AI billing surprise
I kept running into the same problem while building with LLM APIs.
The bill shows up after the damage is already done.
You can have rate limits, dashboards, and pricing pages open in ten tabs, but none of that helps when you are iterating fast and have no live feel for token usage while you work.
That is why I built TokenBar for macOS.
It sits in the menu bar and shows token usage in real time so you can actually see what your prompts and model switches are doing while you build.
The main thing I learned is that AI cost control is usually a visibility problem before it becomes a finance problem. If usage is invisible, people overspend first and analyze later.
I am sharing it here because I suspect a lot of builders have felt the same pain.
If you are building with LLMs, I would love to know what you currently use to keep token costs from getting away from you.
Replies
Real-time visibility is a total game-changer because checking the bill after a heavy dev session usually feels like reading a horror novel. Most builders just cross their fingers and hope for the best, but having a "speedometer" in the menu bar is the perfect way to catch those infinite loops before they turn into a surprise mortgage payment. It's much easier to stay lean when you can actually see the "gas price" for every single prompt.
Do you find yourself obsessively tweaking your prompts now that you can see the tokens ticking away in real time?