Why I Built a Menu Bar App Instead of a Dashboard

Everyone who builds with AI eventually hits the same moment. You're deep in a coding session. Claude is flying. You're feeling productive. Then you open your API dashboard and the number hits you like a bucket of cold water. That happened to me. I don't want to talk about the exact number, but it was enough to make me stop and actually think about what I was doing. The problem wasn't that I was spending money. The problem was that I had no idea I was spending it. The dashboard problem My first instinct was what everyone does: open the Anthropic dashboard. Check the usage graphs. Try to correlate the spikes with what I was working on. But here's the thing about dashboards — they're designed for after-the-fact analysis, not real-time awareness. You go to a dashboard when something's already wrong. It's reactive, not preventive. I tried setting up billing alerts too. Which helped, but it still didn't give me the in-the-moment feedback I actually wanted. I wanted to feel the cost as I was