Show HN: Pacer – Realtime Claude Code Usage Tracking / Pacing Pacer, a free open-source macOS app by developer Eric Andrechek, tracks Claude Code token usage, costs, and rate limits in real time from the menu bar, with features including pace charts, per-project and per-model breakdowns, widgets, and CSV export. The app requires macOS 15 or newer, supports multiple Claude accounts, and is pre-1.0 with active development. Know what Claude Code is costing you — and how close you are to your limits — right from your Mac's menu bar. Pacer is a free, open-source macOS app that keeps an eye on your Claude Code usage: the tokens you're burning, what they cost, how close you are to your 5-hour and weekly rate limits, and where the spend is going — by project, by model, by day. It sits quietly in your menu bar, keeps itself up to date, and keeps all of your data on your own Mac. Menu bar & click-down popover | Home-screen & Notification Center widgets | Share your 5-hour & 7-day burn charts as an image More screenshots — models, projects & collections, six-month history /EricAndrechek/Pacer/blob/main/docs/screenshots/models.png Models — share, trend, and per-model table; group by model or class /EricAndrechek/Pacer/blob/main/docs/screenshots/projects-collections.png Projects & Collections — group projects, scope totals to a collection Heads up — early days.Pacer is pre-1.0 and under active development. It works and it's useful today, but expect the occasional rough edge, and your saved history may need to be rebuilt between 0.x versions. grab the Download the latest version → https://github.com/EricAndrechek/Pacer/releases/latest Pacer-x.y.z.dmg file under "Assets" .- Open the downloaded file and drag Pacer into your Applications folder. - Launch Pacer. It lives in your menu bar — look for the little gauge icon up top there's no Dock icon . Click it to open the dashboard. - The first time, macOS asks permission for Pacer to read Claude Code's files. Click Allow — that's how Pacer sees your usage. Nothing leaves your Mac. That's all. Pacer keeps itself up to date automatically: when a new version ships, it offers to install it for you — no re-downloading, no reinstalling. You'll need macOS 15 Sequoia or newer, on either Apple Silicon or Intel. Rate-limit pacing. Your 5-hour, weekly, and any per-model windows — the scoped caps Anthropic reports for your account, like a weekly Fable limit — as easy-to-read pace charts. Are you ahead, on track, or about to hit the wall? Color bands behind / on track / ahead / nearly maxed tell you at a glance, and every window gets the same forecast: projected fill, time-to-limit, and calibrated bands. Refreshed every few minutes from Anthropic's usage data. Costs, your way. See spend the way Claude Code reports it, or have Pacer price it from tokens itself — switchable in Settings. Daily, monthly, and all-time totals included. Where it's going. Break usage down by project — grouped into your own non-destructive collections — and by model, with every Claude model in its own color and groupable by class. Drill into any single day, and see a GitHub-style activity heatmap of the last six months. Live "today" view. Your current burn rate plus a running "at this pace, today will end at about $X" projection. Multiple accounts. Signed into more than one Claude account? Pacer tracks each account's usage and limits separately and lets you switch between them. At a glance, always. A configurable menu-bar readout — an activity-ring icon, percent chips, and an explicit choice of which window drives the icon — plus home-screen-style widgets, each pickable to whichever window you care about 5-hour, weekly, or a per-model cap for cost and pacing. Optional nudges. Local notifications when you cross a rate-limit threshold 50 / 75 / 90% — on any window, including a per-model cap — or blow past a daily spending limit you set. Off by default. Export. Send daily totals, daily-by-model, or per-project numbers to a CSV for your own spreadsheets. You've got options for keeping an eye on Claude Code usage — Claude Code's own /usage , the popular ccusage https://github.com/ryoppippi/ccusage CLI, and several menu-bar apps — the closest being Token Pacer https://tokenpacer.app , a paid, closed-source namesake, plus Claude God https://claudegod.app and ccseva https://github.com/Iamshankhadeep/ccseva . They're good tools; here's the honest lay of the land. Pacer | | | | | CC /usage | | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Form factor | Menu-bar app | Menu-bar app | Menu-bar app | Menu-bar app | CLI | In-terminal | | Native macOS not Electron | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – Electron | – | – | | Always-on, glanceable | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | | Live limit % from Anthropic's API | ✓ | ✦ | ✓ | ✦ | ✦ | ✓ | | Per-model scoped limit windows | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | | Pace vs. ideal-burn line | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | | End-of-day spend projection | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | | Activity heatmap 6 months | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | | Per-project & per-model breakdown | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | | Beyond Claude Code Codex, opencode, … | – | ✓ | – | – | – | – | | Home-screen / Notification Center widgets | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | – | – | | Threshold / budget notifications | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | | CSV export | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | | ROI: cost vs. git commits | – | – | ✓ | – | – | – | | Claude Code plugin marketplace | – | – | ✓ | – | – | – | | Price | Free | $29 one-time | Free | Free | Free | Included | | Free & open source | ✓ | – | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✦ estimates the windows from your local JSONL logs rather than reading Anthropic's usage API. Token Pacer is a paid, closed-source app, so its column is read from its public site rather than its source — and some of its features CSV export, custom model pricing are Pro-tier. Best-effort as of June 2026 — these tools all move fast, so corrections are welcome via an issue or PR. The gist: vs. — Claude Code's built-in view is a /usage snapshot you ask for in one terminal; Pacer is the always-on, zoomed-out companion that remembers every session. The speedometer in one car vs. the dashboard that logs every trip. vs. — a great CLI for scriptable numbers Pacer's tests even cross-check their scanner against it ; Pacer is the GUI you glance at instead of a command you re-run, and it reads your ccusage actual limit % from Anthropic rather than estimating from logs. vs. Claude God / ccseva — the closest rivals, and genuinely nice. Pacer leans into pacing your windows against an ideal-burn line, "will I run out before the reset?" , native + quiet-by-default, and signed/notarized self-update; Claude God goes further on ROI/git correlation and a plugin marketplace, and ccseva on its glassy UI. Pick the one that thinks about your usage the way you do — they coexist happily. vs. Token Pacer — the close namesake, and the nearest thing to a direct rival: also a native, local-first macOS menu-bar tracker, and it reaches wider — covering Codex and opencode alongside Claude Code, with "next action" nudges. The trade-offs: it's $29 and closed-source , where Pacer is free and open; Pacer reads your real limit % from Anthropic and adds the ideal-burn pacing line, the 6-month heatmap, and widgets. Multi-agent and willing to pay? Fair pick. Claude Code-first and value open source? Pacer. Pacer is local-first . It reads only the files Claude Code already writes to your own Mac, and it sends nothing about your usage anywhere: ~/.claude/projects/ .jsonl — your session token usage, read on your machine.- The Claude Code login token in your macOS Keychain — used only to ask Anthropic for your rate-limit status, the same way Claude Code itself does. The only network connections Pacer makes are: api.anthropic.com — to check your rate-limit windows ~12 small requests an hour while it's running . github.com — to check for, download, and install app updates at launch, then every 6 hours; installs happen in the background when automatic updates are on . No analytics, no telemetry, no third parties. Your data stays on your Mac in ~/Library/Group Containers/…/pacer.sqlite , and it persists across app updates. Pacer is SwiftUI + SwiftData + Charts, signed with Developer ID and notarized, auto-updating via Sparkle https://sparkle-project.org . Contributions welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md /EricAndrechek/Pacer/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md . | Component | Role | |---|---| Pacer.app | Main UI + menu-bar item. Data collection FSEvents JSONL scan + OAuth poll runs in-process inside this binary — there is no separate daemon. | PacerWidgets | WidgetKit extension — reads the shared App Group store directly. | PacerCore | Shared Swift package — parsers, models, scan coordinator, recomputers. | For everyday use, the released DMG https://github.com/EricAndrechek/Pacer/releases/latest is what you want — this section is only for hacking on Pacer. Requirements: macOS 15 SDK Xcode 16+ and xcodegen brew install xcodegen . The Xcode project is generated from project.yml — never edit the .xcodeproj directly. make verify unsigned compile-only check no Apple account needed make test PacerCore unit + ground-truth tests make install signed + notarized build → /Applications/Pacer.app make screenshots regenerate the README screenshots see docs/screenshots.md make help everything else make verify and make test need no signing setup and are all that CI runs. To build a runnable app you need your own Apple Developer account — point the install at it with PACER SIGN IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: