macOS menu bar app to track Claude usage in real time
Details
- External ID
- 46544524
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- macOS menu bar app to track Claude usage in real time
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Jan. 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 161
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.950592885375494
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I built a macOS menu bar app to track Claude usage in real time via API after hitting limits mid-flow too often.Signed and notarised by Apple. Open source.https://github.com/richhickson/claudecodeusagehttps://x.com/richhickson
Enrichment
- Theme
- utilities for Claude and Claude Code
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Observability & eval
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- claude usage tracker for macos
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes It is a straightforward native menu bar app (Swift/Electron/Tauri) that queries the Anthropic/Claude API usage endpoints periodically and displays the result.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: mac-stats, Little Snitch, dozen similar solutions (search results), CodexBar
Concerns raised: Authentication/sign-in issues with Claude Desktop and CLI, "Claude usage probe timed out" errors, Not working for non-subscription API users, Hardcoded ARM dependency prevents installation on Intel Macs via brew, Red X icon with expired authentication message
Feature requests: Show clear useful info on top panel (like mac-stats/Little Snitch), Support for Intel Macs/universal builds, Usage limit alerts to prevent mid-process overages
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 232 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #21 of 233 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 49 days after the earliest competitor.
- Mac menu bar app for Claude Code rate limits · hn · 2026-04-15 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.78
- Claude Meter · hn · 2026-02-10 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.78
- ClaudeUsage · hn · 2026-02-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.73
- macOS menu bar gauges for your Claude Code quota · hn · 2026-06-10 · 69 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- GitHub · ph · 2026-09-30 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Claude Watch · ph · 2026-09-25 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Claude Usage Tracker · ph · 2026-03-23 · 235 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- API Keys, without the terminal · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a observability & eval tool for Media & entertainment yet.