Menu Bar

UsageNow lives in the macOS menu bar. There’s no Dock icon and no main window. Everything happens in the menu bar item and the popover it opens.

The menu bar item#

By default, the menu bar item shows only the UsageNow symbol. It can also show one percentage next to the symbol. See Menu bar display.

The popover#

Click the menu bar item to open the popover.

From top to bottom, it contains:

• Header — the Refresh and Settings buttons.
• Provider sections — one for each enabled provider that’s installed on your Mac.
• Footer — when UsageNow last refreshed, and Quit.

When the provider sections are taller than your screen, they scroll between the header and the footer, so the popover never runs off a small display.

The dot in the footer is green when the last refresh succeeded and orange when a provider couldn’t be refreshed.

These shortcuts work while the popover is open.

To open UsageNow from any app, record a shortcut of your own in Settings › Menu Bar.

Refreshing#

UsageNow refreshes:

• automatically, at the interval you choose in Settings › General (every 5 minutes by default)
• when you open the popover, if the last refresh was more than a minute ago
• when you click Refresh or press ⌘R

During automatic refreshes, UsageNow asks providers for usage limits at most once every five minutes. A manual refresh asks for fresh limits, except while that connection is in a provider-imposed HTTP 429 cooldown. Refresh cannot bypass that pause.

If a refresh fails, UsageNow keeps the last data it had and adds a line such as Couldn’t refresh Codex with a Retry button.

Provider sections#

Each provider section starts with a header:

• Name — the provider, such as Codex, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, Kiro, Warp, OpenCode, Qoder, Qwen Code, Cline, or Grok Build. An account you added carries its name too, such as Codex · Work, and follows the provider's own section.
• Most recent model — the model you used most recently on this Mac, when it can be determined.
• Plan — for example Plus, Pro, or Max 5x. The plan appears only when the provider states it explicitly. UsageNow never guesses it.

When the data shown is more than 10 minutes old, the header adds a note such as Updated 18m ago. When the provider needs you to do something before it can refresh — Claude Code's sign-in has expired, for example — the fix appears under the last known values too, so an old percentage isn't read as current.

Usage windows#

Below the header, each row is one usage window reported by the provider. In the screenshot above, Codex reports a single weekly window, while Claude Code reports a 5-hour window and a weekly one.

• Label — the length of the window: 5-hour, Weekly, or another length the provider reports, such as 30-day.
• Bar and percentage — how much of the window is left, or how much is used if you choose so. With left, the bar shrinks as you use more; with used, it grows.
• Reset time — when the window starts over.

Some windows apply to a single model family. These show the family before the reset time, for example Opus · Resets Mon 09:00.

Left or used#

By default, UsageNow shows the percentage remaining: 58% left means 58% of that usage window remains, and you have used 42%.

To see what's used instead, choose Settings › General › Show limits as › Used. Every percentage then reads the other way round — 42% used — in the popover, the menu bar, and the widget alike, and bars grow instead of shrinking. The word after the number always says which one you're looking at.

Either way, UsageNow rounds so that 0% left and 100% used appear only once the limit has actually been reached.

Reset times#

Times use your Mac’s time zone and a 24-hour clock. Countdowns keep updating while the popover is open.

When little is left#

As a window runs low, its row changes. The color comes with a symbol, so the state never relies on color alone.

VoiceOver reads these states as “High usage” and “Nearly exhausted.”

Which windows appear#

Providers decide which windows exist, and that depends on your plan and can change over time. An account might have only a weekly limit, for example. UsageNow shows exactly the windows a provider reports and never adds a placeholder for a missing one.

Quota pace#

Version 0.9.0 adds a local chart and a clearly labelled consumption estimate for the most critical supported quota window. It needs at least three fresh observations spanning 15 minutes; cached repeats are not new samples. This estimate uses quota percentages, never local token counts, and is not a provider's promise or billing forecast.

Stale readings, resets, a decrease in reported usage, gaps over 35 minutes, or unknown window lengths prevent a forecast. Monthly or generic allowances without a known duration do not get an inferred timeline. New data may take time to build a useful trend after updating.

The small, bounded quota history stays on your Mac, separate from the 30-day activity chart. It is not sent to telemetry or the widget.

Service incidents#

Enable Settings › General › Show service incidents to check public OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot status pages for enabled providers. Checks are off by default and cached for ten minutes; no account or usage data is sent.

An incident is service-wide information, not a diagnosis of your sign-in or a replacement for the provider's usage data. An unavailable status page is not evidence of a healthy service or an expired credential.

Local activity#

Below the windows, a provider section can show today’s activity:

• Tokens today — tokens recorded in the provider’s local session files since midnight. Counts include cached input, as recorded by the tool.
• Credits today — for Kiro, Warp, and Qoder, which measure usage in credits rather than tokens. partial means some of today's credits couldn't be told apart from earlier days; see Warp.
• Requests — model responses recorded today.
• ≈ $4.20 at API prices — what those tokens would have cost if the same work had been billed through the provider's API. See Estimated cost.

Each value appears only when the provider can observe it.

Models today#

When a provider records which model answered — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and Warp do — a compact Models today list appears under the totals, most active first, with each model’s tokens and requests. Up to three models are shown, then “+N more”. It never shows a percentage: account limits aren’t split by model, so a model row is activity only. The list is hidden when only one model was used.

Last 30 days#

Under today's numbers, a chart shows the last 30 days, one bar per day, with the month's totals beneath it:

• the estimated cost of the month at API prices, when the tool's tokens can be priced
• tokens or credits over the month
• the model used most, when the tool records models

Hover a bar to see that day's numbers in place of the month's. Today's bar is the brightest; a day with no activity keeps a thin mark, so the 30 days always read as 30 slots.

Each tool is charted in its own unit: tokens for Codex, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, Qwen Code, Cline, and Grok Build; credits for Kiro and Qoder; requests for Warp, which keeps its credits per conversation rather than per day. A + after the cost means some models had no published price, the same as partial for today.

Days follow your Mac's calendar and time zone, so a day with a clock change is still one bar. The history comes from the same local files as today's numbers — nothing is stored beyond what the tools themselves keep — so a tool that deletes old sessions (Claude Code keeps 30 days by default) shows only what's still there.

To keep the popover short with many providers, turn the charts off in Settings › General › Show the last 30 days.

Balance#

DeepSeek, Kimi, and OpenRouter show money instead of a percentage: what's left on the account, and for OpenRouter what was spent today and this month. The amounts come straight from the service, in its own currency. If the service says the balance can't pay for more requests, a warning appears under it. See API Key Providers.

Estimated cost#

The estimate answers one question: how much work was this? It multiplies today's tokens by the model's published API price, so a day of heavy use reads as a number you can compare, rather than as millions of tokens.

It is not a bill, and UsageNow never sees one. A subscription doesn't charge per token, so if you work inside Pro, Max, or Plus, this money is not being spent. It's what the same work would have cost through the API.

Each kind of token is priced the way providers price it: fresh input, tokens written into the prompt cache, tokens read back from it, and output. That distinction matters more than it sounds. In Claude Code most of the volume is cache reads, billed at a tenth of the input price, so pricing every token at the input rate would overstate a day several times over.

A model UsageNow has no published price for is left out of the total, and the label then reads at API prices, partial rather than pretending the number is complete. Prices ship inside the app and are refreshed with each release, so the estimate needs no network access and no account of any kind.

Cline and Grok Build record what each request cost themselves, from the prices of the provider you ran them with. For them UsageNow shows that figure instead of its own, and estimates only a request they recorded no cost for.

Status messages#

A provider that isn’t installed doesn’t get a section at all. For provider-specific messages, see Codex and Claude Code.

Menu bar display#

Choose what appears next to the symbol in Settings › Menu Bar › Display.

An added account can also be selected in Settings › Menu Bar, such as Codex · Work. Removing it falls back to the provider's first account. Connected-account credits and characters remain separate from today's local token activity.

A few details:

• Most critical usage compares every enabled provider’s windows and picks the one with the least left. Within a provider, when two windows are equally low, the one that resets sooner wins.
• Only one percentage is ever shown. It follows Show limits as: with the default, 58% next to the symbol means 58% left; with Used, it means 58% used. The window chosen is always the one with the least left.
• When no usage limit is available for the chosen option, the menu bar shows the icon alone rather than 0%.
• A provider-specific mode is offered only while that provider is enabled. If you turn the provider off, the display switches back to Icon only.