Where Anthropic gives a progress bar, this gives the receipts

What it does

claude-usage is a local dashboard and CLI that parses the JSONL session transcripts Claude Code drops in ~/.claude/projects/, then surfaces token counts, model breakdowns, session history, and cost estimates in a browser or the terminal. It stores its findings in a local SQLite database and updates incrementally by tracking file modification times. The same interface also ships as a VS Code extension that lives in your activity bar.

The interesting bit

The whole thing runs on Python’s standard library alone—sqlite3, http.server, json, and pathlib—so there are no third-party packages to install or break. It is essentially a thin, opinionated layer of glue between Claude Code’s existing logs and your eyeballs, which is exactly why it works.

Key highlights

• Reads local transcripts from the Claude Code CLI, VS Code extension, and dispatched sessions; cowork sessions are invisible because they never touch local disk.
• Scanner is incremental, tracking file paths and modification times to avoid re-processing unchanged logs.
• Cost estimates use Anthropic’s API pricing table as of April 2026, but only for models whose names contain opus, sonnet, or haiku; everything else is marked n/a.
• Dashboard auto-refreshes every 30 seconds and supports model filtering with bookmarkable URLs.
• VS Code extension bundles the same Python sources and spawns the server automatically inside the activity bar.

Caveats

• Cost figures are based on API pricing, so they do not reflect actual subscription charges if you are on a Pro or Max plan.
• The dashboard loads Chart.js from a CDN, so rendering the charts requires internet access even though the data stays local.
• Cowork sessions are invisible to the tool because Anthropic handles those server-side without writing local transcripts.

Verdict

Worth a look if you are a Claude Code power user who wants granular visibility into token burn across projects and models. Skip it if you only use cowork sessions or already get enough telemetry from Anthropic’s web UI.