My AI bill got too expensive to ignore, so I built a menu bar counter

A few months ago I kept losing track of how much I was actually spending on AI. Not the estimate in my head. The real number. That was the problem. I’d finish a day of shipping with Claude, OpenAI, and a bunch of little prompts, then get hit with a bill that felt larger than it should have been. The cost was invisible while I was working, which made it easy to ignore. So I built TokenBar. It lives in the macOS menu bar and shows token usage in real time. No dashboard. No digging through bil...