Get TokenBrake — free

TokenBrake is free and source-available — everything unlocked, unlimited agents, forever, for individuals and for companies under 100 people and under $1M revenue. No card, no account, no signup. Download it, point one URL at it, and see what every AI on that machine is costing you — cloud dollars and local watts together — with a hard cap and a runaway breaker in front of the bill.

⬇ Download TokenBrake — free (.zip)
Needs Node 24+. Zero dependencies. The menu-bar widget is macOS + the free SwiftBar; the proxy and the breaker run anywhere Node does. About 2 minutes to set up.

Install (the menu-bar widget)

1
Unzip it into your home folder so it lands at ~/TokenBrake.
2
Install SwiftBar — a tiny free menu-bar host (not ours).brew install swiftbar…or download from swiftbar.app.
3
Point SwiftBar at TokenBrake. Open SwiftBar → when it asks for a plugin folder, choose ~/TokenBrake/swiftbar. A 🔥 $… appears in your menu bar. Your local models show up automatically — nothing to configure.

Optional — meter & cap your cloud AIs

4
Start the local proxy (leave it running):node ~/TokenBrake/proxy.mjs
5
Point your AI's base URL at it. In whatever app makes the calls, one line:OpenAI → http://localhost:8787/openai Anthropic → http://localhost:8787/anthropicYour API key passes straight through and is never stored.
6
Set a budget. Hard = stop at the limit. Soft = warn but keep running.node ~/TokenBrake/set-budget.mjs openai 20 hard

Already bought a commercial licence?

Paste the licence key from your Gumroad receipt and you'll get your TokenBrake key back straight away. Lost it? Paste the same Gumroad key again — you'll always get the same one back.

Free for you

Everything is unlocked from the moment you install it: unlimited monitored agents, the runaway breaker, per-agent budgets and every cap. No trial clock, nothing held back, no paid tier with the good features in it. Free for individuals, and for any company under 100 people and under $1M revenue — which is almost everyone. Larger companies need a commercial licence: one payment, one company, no renewal. Nothing about licensing ever stops your API traffic — the only things that ever stop a call are the budget cap and the breaker, which are the features you came for. TokenBrake will never hold your pipeline hostage over a key.

TokenBrake is made by Northjule — that's the name you'll see on your receipt. The source is public on GitHub, so you can read every line before you run it.

Runs entirely on your machine

🔒 Never stores your API keys or your prompts. The proxy forwards your key to the real provider and keeps only token counts and dollars. No cloud account, no phone-home, no data leaves the machine it runs on. It's a safety brake, not a warranty — it dramatically cuts bill-shock; it can't promise a bill will never exceed a budget.