A small open source project called Clawdmeter puts your Claudee Code](/tools/claude-code/) usage data on your desktop as a real-time widget. It's a menu bar or taskbar gadget that shows token consumption, session costs, and usage trends - the numbers Claude Code tracks locally but doesn't surface anywhere visible while you're working.
Tokens are the unit Claude charges by (roughly 4 characters of text per token). Long coding sessions - especially ones involving large codebases or extended back-and-forth edits - can burn through tokens faster than expected, and there's no built-in alert when you're approaching a meaningful spend threshold. Clawdmeter pulls from the local usage logs that Claude Code writes to disk and displays them continuously in a small persistent window.
The project is open source, which means developers can extend it - adding spend alerts, routing data to a spreadsheet, or integrating it into team dashboards if multiple people share a billing account. The target user is a developer running Claude Code for hours a day who wants to understand spending patterns without manually parsing logs or waiting for a monthly statement.
It won't change how you code. But if you're using Claude Code as a primary coding tool and you've been surprised by a bill, Clawdmeter is the kind of small utility that pays for the ten minutes it takes to set up.