Most LLM dashboards show you the bill after the damage is done.
You run a coding agent for an afternoon, ship a feature, and two days later your
OpenAI dashboard says you spent $47. On what? Which model? Which request? You
have no idea — and by then it's too late to do anything about it.
This is the problem we kept hitting, so we built tokeneff — an open-source CLI that puts a real-time electricity meter on your LLM API spend.
⚡ tokeneff 电表 (CNY)
今日花费 ¥0.0284
本月累计 ¥0.2524
月终预测 ~¥0.93 (100% 置信)
累计节省 ¥0.0421
今日模型花费分布
deepseek-v4-flash ¥0.0192 15,797 tok
glm-4-flash ¥0.0092 8,273 tok
tokeneff runs a tiny local proxy on localhost:7860. You point your LLM client's base_url at it, and it:
your client → tokeneff proxy (localhost:7860) → LLM upstream
↓
local SQLite meter
It's a transparent pipe. Your requests still go direct to the provider; tokeneff just reads the usage counts from the response and keeps a running tab.
There are a few LLM cost trackers on GitHub already. Here's where tokeneff fits:
| Feature | tokeneff | toktrack | tokencost | LLM-Cost-Guardian |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capture method | local proxy | reads CLI logs | manual / proxy | local proxy |
| Real-time token count | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Month-end forecast | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Dual region / currency | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| BYOK + platform dual-mode | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Budget alerts | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ |
Three things nobody else does:
The killer feature. Based on your usage trend (weighted: last 7 days × 70% + linear extrapolation × 30%), it predicts what you'll spend by month-end — with a confidence score. Seven days of data and it locks in. "At this rate, I'll hit $31 by the 31st" is the kind of number that actually changes behavior.
If you're a Chinese developer using DeepSeek/GLM/Kimi, your spend is in CNY ¥. If you're using OpenAI/Claude, it's in USD $. Most tools mash these together into one meaningless number. tokeneff tracks them separately — CNY spend and USD spend are never mixed.
BYOK mode is 100% free and local — your keys, your upstream, zero markup. But there's also a platform mode that routes through the TokenEff gateway (one key, all models, wholesale pricing). The meter shows the savings: official price vs platform price, side by side. You switch when it makes sense, not when you're forced to.
This matters more than people admit. A cost tracker that sends your request metadata to a cloud service to compute your bill is... not great. tokeneff:
~/.tokeneff/meter.db is a SQLite file you can rm anytime
pip install tokeneff
tokeneff setup # pick provider, paste key
tokeneff start # starts the proxy on :7860
tokeneff stats # see the meter
tokeneff dashboard # live TUI (refreshes every 0.5s)
Point your client at http://localhost:7860/v1 and start building. Watch the meter while you work — not after.
Ubuntu 22.04 gotcha: the default setuptools (59.6.0) is too old for PEP 621 and installs as UNKNOWN-0.0.0. Run pip install --user --upgrade "setuptools>=70" first. (Yes, this is in the README too.)
Star ⭐ the repo if this solves a problem for you. Issues and PRs welcome — especially new provider additions.
Building tokeneff as part of a broader open-source LLM gateway stack. BYOK meter first, gateway later. The meter is and will remain free + local.