I put my Claude usage limits on my desktop (a PowerShell WPF widget and a SwiftBar plugin)

If you use Claude a lot, you know the message: "You've reached your usage limit." It always shows up in the middle of something.

claude.ai shows how close you are under Settings → Usage, but I never think to open that page until it's too late. So I built two small widgets that keep the numbers in sight:

Both are a single script each, need no install beyond what ships with the OS, and are open source: 👉 github.com/advancedcognitivesystems-ai/claude-usage-widgets

The same three things as the Usage page:

Each limit has a progress bar and a countdown to its reset. The color changes as you get closer: green under 70 %, amber up to 90 %, red above.

The rest of this post covers how it works, and a few tricks that were fun to find.

{ "five_hour": { "utilization": 42, "resets_at": "2026-10-26T16:50:00Z" }, "seven_day": { "utilization": 63, "resets_at": "2026-10-30T08:00:00Z" }, "seven_day_opus": { "utilization": 18, "resets_at": "2026-10-30T08:00:00Z" }, "seven_day_sonnet": null } Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode That's all the widgets need: a percentage and a timestamp. They refresh every 5 minutes, and the countdowns are recomputed locally every minute.

Bonus: if you use Claude Code and haven't saved a session key, both widgets fall back to its OAuth token ( ~/.claude/.credentials.json ) and call api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage, which returns the same shape.

⚠️ These are undocumented internal endpoints. They can change any day, and this project isn't affiliated with Anthropic.

I wanted something people could run without installing.NET SDKs, Node or Python. Every Windows 10/11 machine has Windows PowerShell 5.1, and PowerShell can load WPF. So the whole widget is one.ps1 file.

Add-Type -AssemblyName PresentationFramework, PresentationCore, WindowsBase [ xml ] $xaml = @' <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" WindowStyle="None" AllowsTransparency="True" Background="Transparent" Topmost="True" ShowInTaskbar="False" Width="270" SizeToContent="Height"> <Border CornerRadius="10" Background="#EE1F1E1D" Padding="14,10,14,10">... </Border> </Window> '@ $win = [ Windows.Markup.XamlReader ]:: Load (( New-Object System.Xml.XmlNodeReader $xaml )) Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode WindowStyle="None" with AllowsTransparency="True" gives you the borderless, rounded-corner card. A single $win.DragMove() in a mouse handler makes it draggable.

Invoke-RestMethod is synchronous. Called from a timer on the UI thread, the window freezes for the duration of the request. The fix is a background runspace, plus a DispatcherTimer that checks whether it's done:

$ps = [ powershell ]:: Create () [ void ] $ps. AddScript ( $fetch. ToString ()). AddArgument ( $sessionKey ). AddArgument ( $orgId ) $ script: job = @{ PS = $ps; Handle = $ps. BeginInvoke () } $poll = New-Object Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer $poll. Interval = [ TimeSpan ]:: FromMilliseconds ( 300 ) $poll. add_Tick ({ if ( $ script: job -and $ script: job. Handle. IsCompleted ) { $res = $ script: job. PS. EndInvoke ( $ script: job. Handle ) $ script: job. PS. Dispose (); $ script: job = $null Handle-Result $res # back on the UI thread, safe to touch controls } }) Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode No Dispatcher.Invoke gymnastics: the background part only returns data, and all UI updates happen in the timer's tick, on the UI thread.

The session key shouldn't sit in plain text in a config file. PowerShell's SecureString cmdlets use Windows DPAPI under the hood, so this is enough:

5h 42% · 7d 63% | sfimage=gauge.medium --- Current session (5 h) 42 % | color=#32CA1B ▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱▱▱ Resets in 2 h 17 | font=Menlo size=11 Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The first line goes in the menu bar; everything after --- goes in the dropdown. sfimage= gives you any SF Symbol for free, and the menu bar icon turns amber or red when a limit goes above 70 % or 90 %.

The session key is stored in the macOS Keychain with the security command-line tool, so there's no plain-text file to leak. JXA has no HTTP client I wanted to fight with, so requests go through curl, called with doShellScript. A handy curl flag: -w "\n%{http_code}" appends the status code to the body, so one call gives you both.

Grab the zip for your OS from the releases page, or clone the repo:

Issues and PRs are welcome, especially if the API changes under us, or if you want to add a language. And if you're on Linux: a Waybar or GNOME extension version would be a fun PR. 🙂