Know you're about to hit
your Claude limit — before you do

Yes. Anthropic's own docs put it plainly: "Both Pro and Max plans offer usage limits that are shared across Claude and Claude Code, meaning all activity in both tools counts against the same usage limits." CapMeter reads your account-level usage, so terminal work and browser chats land in the same number.

You get the one number your limit actually runs on, not a split by client.

/usage is computed from local session history on that machine — Claude Code's own wording — so other devices and your claude.ai usage aren't in it. CapMeter reads the account-level number instead, the one your limit actually runs on.

And it's there without being asked. /usage answers when you ask it, but you only think to ask once you're already worried.

No. It opens in demo mode with sample data, so you can click through the popup, the history charts and the settings before connecting anything. Sign in when you want your own numbers in there.

No. CapMeter opens Claude.ai's or OpenAI's own sign-in page in a window and stays out of it: it puts no code into that page and reads nothing out of it, so what you type goes to Anthropic or OpenAI, not to the app. It never sees your password.

What it keeps afterwards is the session credentials your browser would hold anyway — encrypted with the macOS Keychain and stored only on your Mac. It still can't read your conversations.

Yes. CapMeter tracks Claude and Codex/ChatGPT accounts side by side, each with its own history, extra usage or credits, and notifications. Add one or the other, or both, and switch between them from the same popup without opening a browser.

A free counter only helps while you're looking at it. CapMeter turns your burn rate into a time — "limit in ~1h 18m" — and then comes to find you: a macOS notification, or straight into Slack or Discord, while there's still room to do something about it.

Around that: 90 days of history you can export, and a widget that floats above every window and Space — with a live $/hour rate if you're on pay-as-you-go credits.

One payment, not a subscription — less than a month of Claude Pro, and free for the first 14 days. $9.99 is a launch price through October 13, 2026; it goes back up to $14.99 after that.

Your menu-bar session counter keeps working — you don't lose the thing you installed it for. What locks is the layer on top — everything the unlock adds. The display falls back to the ring on its own, and refreshes drop to every 30 minutes.

Buy the unlock and everything picks up where it left off. Nothing is deleted in the meantime.

Then that provider's numbers stop updating until I ship a fix through the App Store — the other provider keeps working normally, since each is read independently. It's the one dependency I can't design around, so it's the one I watch — and if it's something I can fix, getting it working again is the only thing I'd be working on. Your purchase doesn't change while that happens — you paid once, not monthly, and your history stays on your Mac.

The safeguard that actually protects you is the trial: 14 days with every feature unlocked, before any money changes hands.

If you still want one after buying, purchases go through the App Store, so it's Apple's call rather than mine — you'd request it at reportaproblem.apple.com.

Several, and most of them are free. They read the same usage figures Anthropic reports and show you the percentage you have used.

CapMeter is the paid one, and the reason to pick it is what it does with that number rather than the number itself: it measures how fast you are consuming the session and turns that into a time, keeps a daily record so you can compare weeks, sends alerts to Slack, Discord or any webhook, and puts a countdown in a floating window that follows you across Spaces. If a live percentage is all you need, a free tracker will do. See the full comparison for what each one does differently.

Claude shows it under Usage in the web app, which works but means remembering to look — and by the time you think to look you are usually already worried.

CapMeter keeps your session and weekly quota in the macOS menu bar so it is in view while you work, and warns you at thresholds you set before you run out rather than after. See the step-by-step guide for the browser and terminal methods too.

CapMeter counts down to it. Your session window and your weekly window reset on separate schedules, so the two rarely line up and a single "resets at" time doesn't tell you much. The popup shows both as live countdowns, the menu bar keeps the session one in view, and the floating widget ticks it down second by second while you work.

Claude stops responding until the window resets — mid-task, if that's where you happen to be. There's no warning beforehand, which is the reason this app exists.

CapMeter's job is to make that moment predictable rather than sudden: it turns your burn rate into a time, "limit in ~1h 18m", and can alert you at thresholds you choose, so you can wrap up or switch to a lighter model while there's still room to.

No — Apple Silicon only, macOS 12 or later. Mac App Store builds aren't thinned, so shipping a universal binary would make every M-series user download an Intel slice they'd never run. The App Store will simply tell you it's not compatible rather than letting you buy something that won't install.