Why I Built TokenBar: AI Spend Should Not Be a Monthly Surprise

A lot of AI cost advice starts too late. It tells you to review the bill after the damage is done. That never worked for me. The real problem is not that AI is expensive. The problem is that the expensive part happens quietly. One more prompt. One more rewrite. One more huge context dump. Then you look up later and realize you spent money on a conversation that had stopped being useful. That is why I built TokenBar. TokenBar is a macOS menu bar app that keeps token usage and spend visible w...