Alerts that find you away from the Mac.
Telegram and Slack, with a remote-only mode: the message goes out only when you are not at the machine. At your desk you get a normal macOS banner instead of a phone buzzing in your pocket.
Know the minute your Claude Code limit comes back.
A macOS menu bar app that reads the usage data Claude Code and Codex already write on your Mac, and tells you when the 5-hour or weekly window resets. No account. No server. Nothing leaves your Mac.
Apple Silicon, macOS 11 or newer. Free while in beta.
The problem
You are mid-task. Claude Code stops and tells you to try again later. From that moment you have two bad options: keep checking, or walk away and find out an hour after the limit came back that you could have been working.
The reset time is not a secret. Both Claude Code and Codex write it to files on your own Mac. Nothing reads those files and tells you.
What it does
A notification at the reset, not a dashboard you have to remember to open. The alert is scheduled with launchd, so it survives a restart and a logout, and it removes itself after it fires. Click it and the right app opens.
It tells you what you were doing. When Claude runs out, the app notes which Claude Code projects you touched in the last 30 minutes and puts them in the message you get after the reset. You come back to a name, not a blank screen.
Two dots in the menu bar. One for Codex, one for Claude, coloured by how much of the window is gone, with the reset time next to them.
Four things nothing else does
It watches for temporary limit increases.
Providers raise limits for a weekend or run a promotion and announce it on a blog or an RSS feed. The app scans the official sources and tells you. Reddit and X links come through separately, marked as unconfirmed.
It checks itself and repairs what it can.
doctor reports what is broken. Self-repair fixes the safe things on its own, once you turn it on. Diagnostics export gives you a report with no secrets in it, so you can send it to me.
Everything stays on your Mac.
No account to create, no server to send data to, no telemetry. The app reads local files. Telegram tokens and Slack webhooks go into the macOS Keychain, encrypted, with no copy in a plain file.
What it looks like
Statistics answers the question no dashboard asks: what is actually eating the pool. Notifications is where you decide when the app is allowed to interrupt you.
What it is not
Written out so you find out here rather than after installing.
- It does not make your limits bigger and it does not reduce what you use. It tells you where you stand and when you get the pool back.
- It does not log in anywhere for you. It does not read or store your Claude or Codex login credentials.
- It is not notarized by Apple. On first launch macOS will say the app is damaged or from an unidentified developer. That is expected, the fix takes fifteen seconds, and it is written down below.
- Apple Silicon only. The build is arm64. On an Intel Mac it will not start.
- Claude does not report an exact percentage with every event. Claude Code writes a precise number mostly at its warning thresholds. Between them the app shows what it last measured, and says so when that measurement is older than six hours. Codex reports its numbers continuously, so Codex is the precise half of the picture.
- It is a beta. Version 0.3.0-beta.35 today, free while it is in beta.
Install
- Download and unzip.
- Drag
AI-limit-watcher.appto Applications. - First launch: macOS blocks it. Open System Settings, go to Privacy and Security, scroll to the bottom, click "Open anyway", enter your password. If the warning comes back, run
xattr -cr /Applications/AI-limit-watcher.appin Terminal and launch it again. - Allow notifications when asked. That is the whole product.
The app lives in the menu bar and never appears in the Dock. To remove it, drag it to the Trash.
Privacy, in plain terms
Does it send anything anywhere? No. There is no server behind this app and no account. The only outbound traffic is what you switch on yourself: a Telegram or Slack message you configured, and the announcement scanner fetching public pages.
Does it touch my API keys? No. It never reads or writes your login credentials. One optional feature (live percentages for Claude) reads a token that Claude Code already stores in your Keychain, and macOS asks you for permission each time. It is off by default.
What does it store? Reset times, percentages and your settings, in a single file in your home folder. You can delete it and lose nothing but history.
What would this be worth to you?
I built this for myself. Turning it into a product I can keep alive means paying Apple 99 dollars a year to sign it, before anyone has paid me anything. So I am asking before I spend it, not after. Pick a number. It costs you one click and it is the only answer I actually need.