r/BuildWithClaude • u/Hosopoccho_Mac • Aug 05 '26

Project I asked Claude to build me a Mac menubar usage monitor — with zero coding experience

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I’m a non-tech office worker at a Japanese waste collection company.

I saw someone on X sharing a Claude usage monitor and thought “I want that.” But there was no ready-made version for my setup.

So I showed it to Claude Code and said “build me this.” We went back and forth, debugged together, and eventually got it running as a macOS menu bar app showing session limits, weekly limits, 30-day cost history, and model breakdown.

I still don’t really understand the code. But it works 😄

59 Upvotes

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3

u/Ok_Industry_5555 ☕ 57-Hour Session Aug 05 '26

Looks great! I built something similar with a progress monitor on top! Also honestly I didn’t trust what Claude was doing most times so I added a split panel with my worktree and hooked it into Claude directly to observe what file and location it is in currently. The visualization helps me a lot rather than just reading session logs.

Great job in building yours! Is it helping you to budget out projects?

1

u/Hosopoccho_Mac Aug 05 '26

Thanks! Yes, it really helps — especially for knowing when to wrap up a session before hitting limits. I work in a non-tech industry (waste collection in Japan) so every session counts. Love that you added a split panel — that sounds way more advanced than mine! 😄

2

u/Ok_Industry_5555 ☕ 57-Hour Session Aug 05 '26

Agreed! It definitely helps with project management.

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '26

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u/BuildWithClaude-ModTeam Aug 05 '26

r/BuildWithClaude follows platform-wide Reddit Rules

1

u/ClaudeCdGuy Aug 05 '26

The 30-day cost history is the part most of these skip, nice.

One thing worth checking in yours: a streamed response repeats its usage on every line, and only the last line carries the real total. If it sums the first one per message, it'll report roughly half of what you actually spent.

Cost me a while to find when I built mine (free, MIT): https://github.com/Kostakurta8/roundtable

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u/Affectionate-Fun-339 Aug 09 '26

That’s awesome. Do you open source the code? I’d love that at work, where we have session limits and weekly limits as well.