TokNotch

How many times over has each AI plan paid for itself?

_{Free · macOS 14 or later · Signed and notarized by Apple}

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Claude Code, Codex and the rest — priced against the published API rates, sitting at the edge of your screen.

You know what you pay every month. You don't know what you got for it.

TokNotch adds up everything your coding tools actually ran, prices it at what the same work would have cost on the published API rates, and puts one number in front of you:

Or, when a plan hasn't earned its keep yet: $18 to go.

The payback number

Tell TokNotch what a plan costs and when it renews. That's the whole setup.

For Claude Code it usually doesn't even ask — the plan is recognised from ~/.claude.json, the ordinary config file Claude Code already keeps. For Codex it reads the ChatGPT plan the same way. For everyone else you pick your plan by name from a list (Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, Google AI Ultra…) rather than looking a price up, or type any figure you like.

It then counts by your real billing period, not the calendar month. A plan billed on the 3rd paid for the 3rd through the 2nd — judging it on what happened since the 1st quietly mixes in days the last payment already covered. On the 2nd of the month that's nearly a whole period of somebody else's usage.

And three rings, always on

Today · This month · All time. Token counts, at the edge of the screen.

The arcs aren't decoration. Today is measured against your best day in the last thirty, this month against the same days last month, all time against the next milestone. Every card says what it's comparing against.

A full ring means you beat your own record. It's never a warning, and there's nothing here to run out of.

What it counts

Everything your coding tools have actually run, grouped by who made the model rather than who billed for it — so a Qwen you ran locally still counts as Qwen, and a GLM billed through someone else's plan still counts as Zhipu.

Anthropic · OpenAI · Google · DeepSeek · Qwen · Zhipu GLM · Moonshot Kimi · MiniMax · xAI · Xiaomi MiMo · NVIDIA · Meta · Mistral

Each can have a ring of its own. They're all off by default, and the list you choose from is built from what this Mac has really run — vendors you've never touched never appear.

The counting is done by tokscale, which ships inside the app.

Nothing to install. Nothing leaves your Mac.

No Homebrew. No npm. No Node. No account, no sign-in, no API key.

TokNotch reads the session logs your coding tools already write in your home folder. It never opens the keychain, never shows you a password prompt, and never sends anything anywhere.

Codex is the one exception worth spelling out: its plan lives inside ~/.codex/auth.json, which is a credential file. Only the three plan claims are ever read from it — the plan type and its dates. The access token, refresh token and API key sitting beside them are never read, never copied, never logged.

Where it sits

Any of the four edges. Left or right as a slim column; top or bottom as a wide bar. On a MacBook with a notch, the top edge runs up to meet it so the two read as one shape — which is why that is where it starts on a Mac that has one.

Out of the way until you want it. At rest it's a small pill at the edge — reach for it and it opens. Or keep it open always.

Out of your Dock unless you want it. A small icon in the menu bar opens a panel with this period's payback, today, this month and all time. Settings can put it in the Dock too, or take it out of a crowded menu bar.

It knows about your Dock and your menu bar, and moves when they do.

It speaks your language

English · 简体中文 · 繁體中文 · 日本語 · 한국어 · Deutsch · Français · Español · Italiano · Português (Brasil) · Nederlands · Polski · Русский · Türkçe · Tiếng Việt · العربية

Not just the words. Numbers, money and dates follow each language's own conventions — 万 and 亿 in Chinese, k/M/B in English, Mrd. in German.

Getting it

Download TokNotch.dmg, open it and drag TokNotch to Applications. It is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, opens like any other app, starts with your Mac, and keeps itself up to date after that. Every build is on the Releases page.

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer.

Building it yourself

brew install xcodegen
make run

A Debug build, ad-hoc signed, which is enough to run and develop against. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the rest, and docs/RELEASING.md for how a release is cut.

Under the hood

docs/ARCHITECTURE.md walks through the pieces. The short version: a borderless NSPanel that draws a real notch shape, a poller around the bundled tokscale binary, and a SwiftUI card that unfolds out of the edge.

Credits

TokNotch began as a fork of vinzdg/codenotch and was rewritten around local usage accounting. The original is MIT licensed and its copyright is kept in LICENSE.

Usage figures come from tokscale (MIT), bundled in Vendor/tokscale/. Updates use Sparkle (MIT). See THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

License

MIT.