A few months ago I opened an AI bill and had that little stomach-drop moment.
I had been using models like they were free. A few prompts here, a refactor there, a handful of “just try it again” retries, and suddenly the bill was real.
That was the seed for TokenBar.
I wanted a dead simple way to see what was happening while I worked, not after the invoice arrived. Not a dashboard I would forget to open. Not another tab. Just cost and token usage, right where I already live on my Mac.
What surprised me was not the raw spend. It was how invisible it had been.
Once something is visible, behavior changes fast. You stop looping. You stop wasting retries. You ask a better question before you spend another one.
That is the whole product idea for me: make the cost of AI obvious enough that you naturally use it better.
I am still a solo dev shipping this piece by piece, and that part has taught me as much as the product itself. The biggest lesson so far is simple: if something keeps biting you in your own workflow, there is probably a product hiding inside it.
TokenBar came from that kind of bite.
If you have had a similar AI bill surprise, I would love to hear what made it obvious to you.