Alright, first Reddit post ever — if I’m breaking some sacred unwritten rule, please roast me gently in the comments 😂
I’ve been using Claude Code Max for a few months and the one thing that keeps bugging me is… I have zero idea where my quota actually goes. The dashboard just shows a sad little meter going “X% left” and that’s it. No per-project breakdown. No “this prompt cost you 12k tokens” insight. Just vibes and a slowly dying progress bar.
I tried the usual suspects — LiteLLM, Portkey, Langfuse — and they all hit the same wall: they want you to route everything through their proxy with an API key. Cool, except subscription plans like Max don’t give you a key to route. Dead end.
So I spent a weekend building a janky little side project called halton-meter. It’s a local daemon that quietly watches your LLM traffic at the network layer (not the SDK layer), which means it works for both subscription plans and regular API keys. Right now it’s playing nice with Claude (Code + API), OpenAI, Gemini, and Groq.
It gives you a local dashboard showing the stuff I actually care about: cost over time, token usage by project, model split, the whole deal. Everything runs on your own machine — nothing phones home.
Install is literally two lines:
pip install halton-meter
halton-meter start
Dashboard pops up at localhost:3000. That’s it.
Fair warning: It’s still very “works on my machine.” Token estimation is solid for API keys, but I’m still validating accuracy on Max plans (Anthropic doesn’t expose token counts for subscribers, so I’m doing my best). Bugs probably exist. I’m not claiming this is production-grade yet.
Before I sink more time into it, I’d love some real talk:
Is this useful to anyone besides me, or is the mystery quota meter enough for most people?
If you’d actually use something like this, what’s the one feature I’m missing that would make you install it tomorrow?
Did I completely miss an existing tool that already does this for subscription plans? (I searched pretty hard and came up empty.)
Honest feedback only — even if it’s “this solves a problem I don’t have” or “bro just look at the meter like the rest of us.” I’m genuinely just trying to figure out if I should keep going or if this was a fun weekend distraction.
Happy to explain how it works under the hood if anyone’s curious. Thanks for reading.