{"slug": "gauge-see-where-your-claude-code-subscription-goes", "title": "Gauge – see where your Claude Code subscription goes", "summary": "Joey-io released Gauge, an open-source tool that shows Claude Code subscribers where their flat monthly subscription spend goes, breaking down usage by 5-hour window, day, model, and project. The tool reads local session transcripts, dedupes API messages, and displays cost in API-list-equivalent dollars, with no telemetry or network calls. It requires Node 22.5 or newer and is available via npx.", "body_md": "A local meter for your Claude Code plan. You pay a flat monthly price; gauge shows you where it goes — by 5-hour window, day, model, and project.\n\n```\nnpx github:joey-io/gauge\n```\n\nThat's the whole install. It reads the session transcripts Claude Code already\nwrites to `~/.claude/projects`\n\n, dedupes them down to real API messages, and\nrenders one screen:\n\n- your last 5 hours of spend against the biggest 5-hour window you've ever had\n- daily bars for the last 14 days\n- which models and which projects are eating the allowance\n\nNothing leaves your machine. No account, no telemetry, no network calls.\n\n- Dollars are\n**API-list-equivalent**— what this usage would cost at Anthropic's published API rates. Subscription plans don't publish their quota mechanics, so this is the only honest common currency. It is not your bill. - Claude Code writes one transcript line per streamed chunk, all carrying the same message id, and replays messages into new files when sessions resume. gauge dedupes by message id; naive line-summing over-counts badly.\n- Subagent transcripts nest several directories deep. gauge walks them — in testing they held roughly half the spend.\n- \"Peak 5h window\" is your observed ceiling, labeled as such. Anthropic doesn't expose the actual plan limit.\n\nNode 22.5 or newer (uses the built-in sqlite — zero npm dependencies).\nA Claude Code history at `~/.claude/projects`\n\n.\n\n```\ngauge --days 30       # widen the by-model / by-project sections\ngauge activate <key>  # register a license key (verifies offline)\nGAUGE_DATA_DIR=...    # move the cache db (default ~/.cache/gauge)\n```\n\nThe first run scans your full history (about a minute per GB of transcripts). After that it's incremental and takes a second or two.\n\nMIT.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gauge-see-where-your-claude-code-subscription-goes", "canonical_source": "https://github.com/joey-io/gauge", "published_at": "2026-08-02 22:34:01+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-02 22:52:53.656885+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "ai-tools"], "entities": ["Joey-io", "Gauge", "Claude Code", "Anthropic"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gauge-see-where-your-claude-code-subscription-goes", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gauge-see-where-your-claude-code-subscription-goes.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gauge-see-where-your-claude-code-subscription-goes.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/gauge-see-where-your-claude-code-subscription-goes.jsonld"}}