Token Warden

Budget and spend radar for indie devs burning tokens on Claude and GPT

Problem

Indie devs now split work between cloud Claude for hard tasks and local models for grunt work, but have no idea how much each project actually burns until the monthly bill arrives. On Chinese forums people complain they cannot afford Opus directly, Cursor is too expensive, and they end up hunting sketchy cheap relay services.

Solution

A local-first desktop utility that reads CLI logs from Claude Code, Codex and Copilot, aggregates token spend per project, model and day, compares against daily/monthly budgets you set, and pings you from the menu bar or terminal before you blow through them, attributing overruns to specific sessions and tool calls.

Users

Indie developers and small studios whose main work happens through AI coding agents

MVP

Parse local Claude Code / Codex logs; aggregate tokens and estimated cost by project and model; daily and monthly budget thresholds with desktop alerts; one-click weekly spend digest export; editable pricing table

Revenue

One-time purchase at $19-29; Pro subscription for shared team budgets; affiliate deals with official token resellers

Why now

AI coding agents became a daily workflow while vendors offer almost no personal-level spend attribution, and indie devs are their own first customer