A few days ago I wrote about the screenshot that stopped the internet. Peter Steinberger, founder of OpenClaw, posted a CodexBar dashboard showing a $1.3 million AI token bill racked up in 30 days. The internet assumed it was one person. It was not. It was a three-person organisation running roughly 100 autonomous agents around the clock. If you missed that story, you can read the full breakdown here.
What caught my attention beyond the number was the tool he used to surface it. CodexBar. A tiny macOS menu bar app that tracks your AI usage across multiple providers in one place. I decided to install it myself and see what it showed me.
Here is what happened.
What CodexBar actually is
CodexBar is a free, open source macOS app built by Peter Steinberger. It sits in your menu bar at the top of your screen and tracks usage limits, token consumption, session windows, and reset timers across more than 40 AI providers. Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, and more are all supported.
The key thing to understand about CodexBar is that it is not a window that pops up on your screen. It has no Dock icon. It just quietly lives in your menu bar and you click it when you want to see what is going on. That confused me for longer than I would like to admit during the install process.
It is completely free, privacy first, and stores no passwords. It reads from existing CLI sessions, browser cookies, and OAuth credentials that are already on your machine. Nothing new gets sent anywhere.
Installing it
Install is one command if you have Homebrew:
brew install --cask steipete/tap/codexbar
Once that finishes, open Spotlight with Cmd and Space, type CodexBar, and hit Enter. Then look at the top right of your screen near your clock and WiFi icons. That is where it lives.
I will be honest. I ran the install, saw nothing happen, and spent ten minutes convinced it had not worked. The Activity Monitor eventually showed it was running. The app was there the whole time. I just had too many icons in my menu bar and CodexBar was hiding behind them. If that happens to you, try shrinking your browser window to reveal more of the menu bar on the right side.
Once I could actually see it and clicked it, the setup was straightforward. Go to Settings, then Providers, and toggle on the tools you use.
A note on API keys and privacy
When you open the Providers list you will notice that some tools, including OpenAI API, Gemini, z.ai, and several others, require an API key to pull usage data. If you have those keys, you can paste them directly into the Settings panel for each provider and CodexBar will start tracking that usage immediately.
If you are wondering whether that is safe, the short answer is yes. API keys are stored locally on your machine in a config file with restricted permissions, and for some providers they go into your Mac Keychain, which is the same secure storage used for your other passwords. The app is fully open source on GitHub, so anyone can inspect exactly what it does with those credentials. Nothing is transmitted to external servers.
If you do not have your API keys handy or prefer not to enter them, that is fine too. Providers that connect via OAuth or existing CLI sessions, like Claude and Codex, work without any keys at all. You can get real value from CodexBar with just those two enabled.
What it showed me
I use Claude and Codex regularly so I enabled both. Claude connected immediately through the credentials already stored by the Claude CLI. No extra steps needed.
The Claude tab showed my session usage at 51 percent remaining with a reset timer ticking down, and my weekly usage at 93 percent remaining. There is also a separate meter for Sonnet, which has its own weekly cap independent of the main limit. Seeing all three numbers at once in one click was genuinely useful. I had no idea Sonnet had a separate cap until CodexBar surfaced it.
The Codex tab was where things got interesting. It pulled in token data from local logs and showed me 99 million tokens consumed over the last 30 days. It also generated a cost estimate of $76.92 for that period. Important note on that figure: it is not my actual bill. I am on a $20 per month Plus subscription, not a pay per use API plan. CodexBar calculates what those tokens would cost at API rates as a reference point, not as a reflection of what you are actually being charged. The token count is real. The dollar figure is an estimate.
Still, 99 million tokens in 30 days was a number I had never seen before. I run several Hermes agents via my Codex subscription and had no real sense of the scale of what they were processing. Now I do.
Why this matters if you use more than one AI tool
Most people running AI tools regularly are doing what I was doing. Jumping between Claude, Codex, Cursor, or whatever else is in the stack, with no single view of what is being used or how close to the limit you are at any given moment. You only find out you have hit a cap when the tool stops responding mid-session.
CodexBar fixes that. One click and you can see exactly where you stand across everything you have configured, with precise timers showing when each window resets. For anyone using AI tools heavily, that visibility alone is worth the five minutes it takes to install.
FAQ
What is CodexBar and how does it work on macOS? CodexBar is a free macOS menu bar app that tracks usage limits and token consumption across more than 40 AI providers including Claude, Codex, Cursor, and Gemini. It reads from existing sessions and credentials already on your machine, so no passwords are stored. You install it, enable the providers you use in Settings, and it displays your usage data each time you click the menu bar icon.
Is it safe to enter my API keys into CodexBar? Yes. API keys are stored locally on your machine with restricted file permissions, and for certain providers they are stored in your Mac Keychain rather than a plain config file. The app is fully open source under the MIT licence and has been publicly audited by the community on GitHub. Nothing is sent to external servers. That said, if you prefer not to enter keys, providers that use OAuth or existing CLI sessions like Claude and Codex will still work without them.
Does CodexBar work with Claude and Codex at the same time? Yes. You can enable multiple providers simultaneously and each gets its own tab in the menu. There is also an Overview tab that gives you a combined view across everything you have configured. If your menu bar gets crowded, Merge Icons mode combines all providers into a single icon with a built in switcher.
If you use more than one AI tool regularly and have never actually checked how much of each one you are burning through in a given week, CodexBar is worth installing today. It is free, it takes one command, and the first time you see all your usage in one place you will wonder how you managed without it.
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