AI Pulse · Under the Radar

A developer built a simple macOS menu-bar app over the weekend. It does one thing: shows you how much you’ve spent across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google AI APIs in one place. No fancy features, no cloud sync, just local tracking. The repo picked up 105 stars in 24 hours with zero promotion.

That’s not viral by internet standards, but it’s a clear signal. If you’re running AI tools in your business, you’re probably paying multiple vendors. OpenAI for one task, Claude for another, maybe Gemini for something else. Each one bills separately. Each one has its own dashboard. None of them talk to each other. You have no single view of what you’re actually spending until the credit card statement arrives.

This matters because AI costs scale fast and quietly. A few developers experimenting, a couple of customer-facing agents, some batch processing, it adds up. Most finance teams aren’t set up to track API usage the way they track SaaS seats. The line items are vague. The usage is distributed. You don’t notice the creep until it’s a real number.

The fact that someone built this tool, and that it found an immediate audience, tells you the vendors aren’t solving this problem. They don’t want to. Unified billing across competitors isn’t in their interest. But it’s very much in yours.

If you’re serious about AI, you need visibility into what’s running, what it’s costing, and where the spend is going. That’s the kind of thing we build into an AI command centre, where usage, cost, and control sit in one place instead of scattered across vendor portals. You can’t manage what you can’t see, and right now, most businesses can’t see much at all.