JP the Cat

JP the Cat is a small macOS app that sits in your menu bar and keeps an eye on what your AI coding agents are costing you. If you run Claude Code or Codex all day, the spend and the usage limits are easy to lose track of right up until a bill or a rate cap catches you off guard. JP watches quietly in the background and shows today's total alongside how close you are to your limits, with a cat as the mascot doing the counting for you.

The clever part is that it needs no API keys and no account. Claude Code and Codex already write detailed usage logs to your Mac as you work, and JP simply reads them. From those logs it calculates real costs in actual dollars using the official per-model rates, and it does the accounting properly, handling cache splits and de-duplication so the number reflects what you're truly spending rather than an inflated or rounded-off guess. All of that processing happens locally on your machine, and the only thing that ever contacts a remote server is license validation, so your prompts and code never go anywhere.

The always-visible piece is a menu bar pill that shows today's total spend right next to your limit percentages, so a glance at the top of your screen tells you where you stand. It reads the official 5-hour and weekly usage percentages straight from Codex logs, and Claude limits are available through an opt-in Live Limits feature. When you cross 80 percent of a limit it fires a single native macOS notification, one clear nudge rather than a stream of interruptions, so you get the warning you need to slow down before you run into a wall mid-task.

Beyond the pill there's a fuller dashboard for when you want the whole picture. It breaks spending down per provider and charts your history over rolling 7, 14, 30, or 90-day windows, so you can see whether your costs are trending up or holding steady instead of only ever seeing today's figure. For anyone who likes to keep an eye on the numbers, detailed gauges lay out exactly how much of each limit you've used and what it has cost so far.

There's also a native macOS widget that comes in small, medium, and large sizes with both light and dark themes, so you can pin your burn rate to the desktop or the notification center and keep it in view without opening anything. It's the same underlying data as the pill and the dashboard, just presented wherever you find it most useful to glance at during a long working session.

The reason the numbers can be trusted comes down to how the costs are worked out. Rather than estimating loosely from token counts, JP applies the official per-model rates and accounts for the way prompt caching splits a request into cached and fresh portions, then de-duplicates so the same usage is never counted twice. The result is a figure that lines up with what you'll actually be billed, not a ballpark. Because everything is read from logs already sitting on disk, there's nothing to configure, no keys to paste, and no risk of your prompts being sent off to a third party just so you can watch a dollar figure tick up. The app stays out of the loop of your real work and only reports on it. For a solo developer that's peace of mind for the price of a coffee, and for a team it means everyone is looking at the same honest number instead of arguing over rough estimates.

It's for developers and teams who lean on Claude Code or Codex and want to avoid an ugly surprise at the end of the month. If you've ever finished a marathon agent session and genuinely wondered what it just cost, or wished for a heads-up before you burn through a weekly cap and lose access at the worst possible moment, that's precisely the low-level anxiety this app is built to remove. It doesn't change how you work, it just makes the cost of the work visible.

JP the Cat runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or newer on Apple Silicon Macs. Pricing stays simple and refreshingly old-fashioned. It's a one-time $12.99 for one Mac and $9.99 for each additional Mac, with no subscription anywhere in sight. There's a 7-day free trial with every feature unlocked and no card required, plus a free-forever tier that keeps the live menu bar pill showing today's total and your official limits even after the trial ends. The paid unlock is what adds the dashboard, the widget, the detailed gauges, and the alerts. The split is honest about what you're paying for, the always-on pill that shows today's spend and where your limits stand stays free for good, and the one-time purchase simply buys the deeper reporting on top of it. Support is reachable directly at support@jpthecat.com.