Claude Usage Monitor for Windows

Monitor your Claude Code rate limits in real time right from your Windows system tray.

A native Windows tray app that shows your Claude usage at a glance.

Lightweight (~6 MB single EXE) and fast native .NET app with Fluent Design UI. Works with both Claude Code native for Windows and Claude Code in WSL.

Rate limits are shared across claude.ai, Claude Code, and its IDE extensions, so you always know how much of your session and weekly limits you have left.

Features

• Native & lightweight — single EXE (~6 MB), no installation, no Electron, no Python. Download and run
• Zero configuration — authenticates through your existing Claude Code login. No API key, no manual token entry
• Speedometer gauges — beautiful gauges with gradient arcs (green/orange/red), animated needle, tick marks, and percentage display
• Time marker — white line on each gauge showing elapsed time in the current period, so you can instantly see whether your usage is ahead of or behind the limit
• Live tray icon with dynamic SVG icons showing usage percentage (0-100%), color-coded status dot, and theme-aware colors for light and dark taskbars
• Detail popup (left-click) — Session gauge (5h window), Weekly gauge (7d window), plus collapsible Sonnet Only and Overage cards with gradient progress bars
• Smart credential discovery — automatically finds credentials from Claude Code native for Windows or WSL distros (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.), picking the most recently used installation when both exist
• WSL availability guard — WSL paths are skipped with a 3-second timeout if WSL isn't running, so native-only users experience zero startup delay
• Fluent Design UI — Windows 11 Mica backdrop, rounded corners, smooth slide-up animation, collapsible sections, auto-sizing window
• Dark & light theme — automatically follows your Windows theme in real time
• 14 languages — English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Indonesian, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Polish, Russian — auto-detected from your Windows display language, with manual override from the context menu
• Adaptive polling — speeds up during active usage (5 min), normal interval (7 min), slows down when idle (20 min), aligns to imminent quota resets, and backs off on rate-limit errors with exponential backoff
• Required API headers — sends the claude-code/* User-Agent header (auto-detecting your installed Claude Code version) and anthropic-beta header
• Launch at Login — optional Windows startup via the right-click context menu

Requirements

• Windows 10 or Windows 11 (64-bit)
• .NET 8.0 Runtime
• Claude Code installed and logged in (native Windows CLI, WSL, VS Code extension, or JetBrains plugin — any variant works). The app reads the OAuth token that Claude Code stores locally (~/.claude/.credentials.json).

Quick Start

No build tools required. Download the latest ClaudeUsage.exe from the Releases page, place it wherever you like, and run it.

How to Use

Action	What happens
Hover over the tray icon	Tooltip shows session and weekly usage percentages with reset times
Left-click the tray icon	Opens the detail popup with gauges, Sonnet/Overage cards, and reset countdowns
Right-click the tray icon	Context menu: Refresh, Launch at Login, Language selector, Exit
Escape or click outside	Closes the detail popup

Tray icon not visible?

Windows may hide new tray icons by default. To keep the icon always visible:

1. Right-click the taskbar, then Taskbar settings
2. Expand Other system tray icons (Win 11) or Select which icons appear on the taskbar (Win 10)
3. Toggle ClaudeUsage to On

How It Works

The app automatically discovers your Claude Code OAuth credentials by searching (in order):

1. Windows native: %USERPROFILE%\.claude\.credentials.json
2. WSL distros: \\wsl$\{distro}\home\{user}\.claude\.credentials.json (Debian, Ubuntu, Kali, etc.)

If credentials are found in both locations, the most recently modified file is used, so it automatically follows whichever Claude Code installation you're actively using.

The app queries the Anthropic usage API with proper authentication headers and displays your current limits as speedometer gauges with live-updating countdowns and time markers.

Note: This uses an undocumented API that could change at any time.

Building from Source

1. Clone this repository
2. Open visualstudio-project/ClaudeUsage/ClaudeUsage.sln in Visual Studio 2022
3. Restore NuGet packages
4. Build in Release mode
5. Publish as single-file:

dotnet publish -c Release -r win-x64 --self-contained false /p:PublishSingleFile=true

Tech Stack

• C# / .NET 8 — native Windows performance, no interpreted runtime
• WPF with WPF-UI — Fluent Design System (Mica, dark/light theme)
• WPF DrawingContext — native hardware-accelerated gauge rendering (no SkiaSharp, zero extra native DLLs)
• Svg.NET — dynamic tray icon rendering
• System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon — system tray integration

License

MIT