Spender

Spender reads your spend straight from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, xAI, Kimi, Qwen and OpenRouter. Keys stay in the macOS Keychain — there is no Spender account, no backend, and no credential proxy.

It never passes an estimate off as an official figure: every number is labelled with where it came from, and a metric a provider does not report is left blank rather than rounded down to zero.

Install

Download Spender.dmg — the latest release, for macOS 14 or later. Open it and drag Spender to Applications. The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without a warning. Release notes and checksums are on the Releases page.

Spender lives in the menu bar and has no Dock icon. Connect a provider from Options → Connections, and turn on Options → Settings → Launch at Login to keep it there after a restart. Prefer to build it yourself? See Build and run.

What it does

• Shows today, yesterday, and 30-day spend in a menu bar panel.
• Combines supported USD reports into a provider breakdown and daily trend.
• Displays official balances where a provider exposes them.
• Tracks DeepSeek spend locally from balance decreases and clearly labels it as estimated.
• Shows token and model usage when the provider has an official reporting API.
• Lets you reorder and hide providers without removing saved credentials.
• Refreshes in the background, retains the last good snapshot, and supports launch at login.

What it looks like

Spender lives in the menu bar and shows the running total next to the clock. Click it to open the panel above: the total, a bar showing which providers it is made of, then one card per connection, largest spender first. Everything below is one click deeper.

Connecting a provider. Open Options → Connections, find the provider and paste its key into the field. Some providers need a key that is not their ordinary inference key — an admin or management key with read access to billing — and their card says which one and links to the instructions for creating it. Saved keys go into the macOS Keychain and are never shown again.

30 Days. The same total over a month, with each provider labelled Official or Estimated so it is clear which figures came from a billing API and which Spender derived itself. Below it, spend per day, each bar split into the providers' colours.

A card opened up. DeepSeek publishes no cost history, so Spender derives the figure from saved balance decreases — and says so on the card, next to the balance the provider does report. Each card also links to that provider's own billing, dashboard and status pages.

Supported providers

Provider	Connection	Metrics in Spender
OpenAI	Organization Admin API key	Official cost, tokens, and models; remaining balance you enter once (see below)
Anthropic	Console Admin API key	Official cost, tokens, and models; remaining balance you enter once (see below)
DeepSeek	Standard API key	Official balance; estimated daily spend from saved balance decreases
Kimi	Standard API key and matching API host	Official balance
Qwen / Alibaba Cloud	Model Studio API key; optional read-only BSS AccessKey credentials	Key validation; official Alibaba Cloud balance and Qwen billing when BSS is configured
xAI / Grok	Team-scoped Management API key	Official prepaid balance, usage, and model breakdown
OpenRouter	Management API key	Official remaining credits

OpenAI and Anthropic balances

OpenAI and Anthropic report what you spent, but their APIs do not return the credit you have left. So on those two cards you enter it once: Add Balance, then type the amount shown on the provider's Billing page. From then on Spender subtracts every new official cost report from it, and the card shows both the remaining balance and what was spent since you entered it.

The result is a calculation, not a figure the provider reported. Top-ups, refunds and credits it cannot see make it drift, so when it no longer matches Billing, use Recalibrate and enter the current amount again. Anthropic costs marked partial are not subtracted (see below). DeepSeek, Kimi, xAI, OpenRouter and Qwen (with BSS credentials) do report their balance, and there it comes straight from the provider.

Why some providers are not here

Spender shows only money that a provider itself reports through a documented API. These providers do not offer that to an ordinary account yet:

Provider	Why it is missing
Gemini	An ordinary API key can call the models but cannot read what the account has spent.
Perplexity	The same: the API key works for requests, not for billing.
Mistral AI	Reading spend needs an Admin API key. Mistral issues those only to Enterprise accounts, through its account team, and the Admin API is still a preview.
OpenCode Zen	OpenCode documents only the endpoints for calling models. There is no public way to read the balance or what was spent.
Z.ai	You can pay per call or buy usage bundles, but there is no documented API for reading the balance.

Some apps work around this by calling a provider's internal, undocumented endpoints. Spender does not: such an endpoint can change or disappear without notice, and a wrong number is worse than no number. If any of these providers publishes a supported way to read spend, it can be added.

Cost reports and token-report failures

A failed or incomplete token report no longer discards a received OpenAI or Anthropic cost report. Missing token totals are omitted, not displayed as zero. OpenAI's complete cost report remains eligible for totals and balance deductions; token-report rate limits still delay retries.

Anthropic remains conservative: when usage scope cannot be checked, or Priority Tier usage is detected, its received costs are retained but marked partial and excluded from automatic balance deductions. The Cost API does not include Priority Tier charges. See Anthropic's documented scope.

DeepSeek accuracy

DeepSeek's public API returns the current balance but not historical cost buckets. Spender therefore compares consecutive saved balance observations:

• a decrease is saved for the full interval between the two observations;
• Today, Yesterday, and the daily chart include it only when that entire interval fits inside one UTC day;
• 30 Days includes multi-day intervals only when they fit entirely within the selected window; missing observations are not treated as complete history;
• an increase is treated as a top-up and is not counted as negative spend;
• the estimate starts after Spender has saved its first balance observation;
• usage between widely separated observations, grant expiry, or an intervening top-up can make the estimate differ from DeepSeek's Usage export.

Existing daily estimates from older versions are retained, but cannot be redated without their original observation timestamps. These historical estimates are not retroactively corrected.

For authoritative history, use the CSV export on the DeepSeek Usage page.

Privacy and security

• API keys and administrative secrets are stored in macOS Keychain.
• Provider requests are restricted to declared HTTPS origins.
• Cached snapshots and preferences remain in the user's local Application Support and UserDefaults data.
• The repository contains no telemetry backend and no shared credential service.

Use the narrowest read-only administrative credential each provider supports. Do not reuse inference keys outside their intended provider.

Requirements

• macOS 14 or later
• Xcode with the macOS SDK
• A personal Apple Development team selected under Signing & Capabilities for a signed local install

Build and run

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/bestmark1/spender.git
   cd spender
   

2. Open LLMSpendMonitor.xcodeproj in Xcode.

3. Select the LLMSpendMonitor scheme and My Mac destination.

4. Choose your Development Team in Signing & Capabilities.

5. Press Run.

To build and install a signed Release copy in /Applications/Spender.app:

./scripts/install-local.zsh

The installer builds from the current checkout, replaces only /Applications/Spender.app, verifies its code signature, and launches it. Enable Options → Settings → Launch at Login if desired.

Release builds

./scripts/release.zsh produces the published DMG: it archives the Release build, signs it with a Developer ID, has Apple notarize the app and the DMG, staples both, checks them with Gatekeeper, signs the DMG for Sparkle and adds it to site/appcast.xml. ./scripts/release.zsh appstore builds the SpenderAppStore target — the same app without Sparkle, which the App Store updates itself — for App Store Connect; add --upload to send it. It needs the maintainer's certificates, stored notarization credentials and the Sparkle signing key. Publishing the GitHub release and the appcast are separate steps.

The direct download updates itself through Sparkle: it checks https://usespender.com/appcast.xml once a day and offers the update in the panel rather than interrupting.

Tests

Run the unit test suite from the command line:

xcodebuild test \
  -project LLMSpendMonitor.xcodeproj \
  -scheme LLMSpendMonitor \
  -destination 'platform=macOS' \
  CODE_SIGNING_ALLOWED=NO

UI tests require macOS Accessibility permission for the Xcode test runner.

Project structure

LLMSpendMonitor/
├── App/              app and menu bar lifecycle
├── Domain/           money, metrics, and provider snapshots
├── Features/         dashboard, connections, and customization state
├── Infrastructure/   networking, Keychain, and local persistence
├── Providers/        provider-specific API clients
├── Services/         refresh, aggregation, and notifications
└── UI/               SwiftUI menu bar interface

Provider API notes and contract validation material live in docs/research.

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