ai-token-monitor vs tare
Menu-bar/tray app for macOS and Windows that reads Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode session logs and shows live token spend — per-model pricing with cache reads, plan-limit bars, webhook alerts. — versus — Claude Code skill that reads your local session logs and answers 'where did my tokens go' in plain English: deduplicated totals, cost charged to the tool that caused it, 5-hour window state.
Same worry — 'am I about to hit the limit'. ai-token-monitor is an always-on menu-bar gauge with plan-limit bars; tare is retrospective forensics that tells you how full the window was at the exact moment you got locked out.
| ai-token-monitor | tare | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 321 | 161 |
| Forks | 53 | 8 |
| Language | TypeScript | Python |
| License | — | MIT |
| Last activity | 11 days ago | 3 days ago |
| Topics | coding | coding, skills, local |
| Curated connections | 8 | 7 |
ai-token-monitor — the curator's take
Zero-setup observability for the coding-agent bill: no API keys, no proxy — it prices the session logs your CLIs already write (cache reads included) and puts today's spend next to the clock, with live 5-hour-session and weekly plan bars that ping Discord/Slack/Telegram before you hit the wall. Offline by default; the leaderboard and chat are strictly opt-in. NOT enforcement or routing — it measures, it doesn't reduce; pair it with a gateway or harness caching fixes when the number scares you. macOS/Windows only, and note the repo currently ships no license file.
tare — the curator's take
Install it the day you get rate-limited and can't explain why. Two things make it better than the usual token dashboard: it deduplicates Claude Code's repeated response records (~86% inflation on the author's data), and it charges tokens to the tool that *caused* the re-sends rather than the one that returned bytes — which is how one big early file read quietly dominates a week. It is diagnosis, not control: no budgets, no blocking, no compaction, nothing changes your behaviour for you. Claude Code only, so multi-harness shops want a cross-CLI ledger instead. Everything stays local, and SECURITY.md tells you which greps verify that.