Pulse,
Claude's heartbeat

He reacts to what you burn, right in your macOS menu bar.

Pulse at rest
This month · burned
$0of $20000%
~0 tokens *

That's the idea. 🔥

You just burned $2000 for fun.
Now track your real usage. At a glance.

Click or hold to burn 🔥  ·  poke Pulse to react* ≈ $1 / 800K tokens avg

Pulse for Claude — real panel
Try him

Always on.
Always watching.

Always there
Lives in your menu bar

One click opens the panel. He never gets in the way, but he's always watching.

Reacts to you
Feels every token you burn

Idle when you're idle. Hyper when you're burning. At 80%, he starts sweating.

Knows when to wave
Waves when Claude goes quiet

When Claude stops mid-session without finishing, Pulse waves. Every 5 min until you come back.

Eco-conscious
Knows your impact on the planet

CO₂, water, energy, estimated on-device from your real token count. In everyday terms.

Questions for Pulse.

Does the app read my Claude conversations?
No. Never. It reads the .jsonl files Claude Code writes locally: only token counts and model names. Content never touched, never stored, never sent anywhere.
What happens when I connect to claude.ai?
An in-app private browser (sandboxed WKWebView) opens. Pulse reads two numbers: amount spent + monthly limit. That's all. Session cookies stay inside the sandbox; Swift never sees them.
Does any data leave my Mac?
Nothing. No server, no telemetry, no analytics. The only network call is the one-time claude.ai sync, and even that is optional. Daily tracking is 100% local.
What's stored on my Mac?
Only in UserDefaults: amount spent, monthly limit, calibration. And in ~/.claude-pulse/daily-log.json: Claude Code cost per day. No auth tokens, no keys, no conversation data.

What's new.

v2.3.1 Aug 2026
  • The panel was the last expensive thing. Opening it while Claude worked animated the mascot at 30 frames a second, and each frame re-laid out the entire panel. The animation setting now covers the panel as well as the menu bar, and nothing animates at all while the panel is closed.
v2.3.0 Aug 2026
  • Pulse stops animating for no reason — and that was the real CPU problem. The hop that ran the whole time Claude worked is now off by default, and can be switched back on in Settings if you want it. More importantly, the "come and look" wave used to replay every five minutes for as long as you stayed away from your desk; over a night that alone added up to hours of CPU time. It now waves for a few seconds, then holds an arms-up pose — same message, no ongoing cost.
  • Normal use now sits at about 1% CPU, down from 13–18%. Nothing about what Pulse tells you has changed.
v2.2.6 Aug 2026
  • Icon frames are drawn once, not on every screen refresh — the menu bar image was being stored as a set of drawing instructions rather than as finished pixels, so macOS re-ran the whole drawing every time it displayed it. It is now rasterised once.
  • The animation stops when the menu bar is hidden — with a fullscreen app in front, Pulse kept animating behind it at full cost for nobody. Idle now sits at about 1.3% CPU.
  • A correction to what v2.2.3 and v2.2.4 claimed here. Careful profiling showed the earlier "~4% while Claude works" figure was too optimistic, and that v2.2.4's frame cache saved nothing at all. While the animation runs, most of the cost is macOS's own status-bar machinery redrawing and shadowing the icon — not Pulse's drawing, which doesn't even register in a profile. Lowering the frame rate barely helps, because the system coalesces those updates.
v2.2.4 Aug 2026
  • An attempt at making the animation cheaper — poses were cached so each would only be drawn once. Later measurement showed this had no effect (see v2.2.6); the cache held the drawing instructions, not the pixels.
v2.2.3 Aug 2026
  • The animation is smooth again, without giving back the CPU savings — v2.2.2 fixed the CPU problem partly by slowing the menu bar animation down, which made it choppy. The real culprit was that a variable-width menu bar item makes macOS recompute its layout on every icon update; pinning that width removes the expensive path entirely. Full-speed animation, and CPU still well below where it was: ~4% while Claude works, under 1% idle.
v2.2.2 Aug 2026
  • Important: Pulse was using far too much CPU — left running all day it could pile up hours of CPU time and slow your machine down. On a busy machine, sustained CPU went from around 10% to under 3%; idle is now close to nothing.
  • What was wrong — the menu bar icon was re-pushed 30×/second (each push makes macOS run a full layout pass), the whole dataset was re-aggregated every 2 seconds even with nothing new on disk, parsed events were kept forever so each pass got slower the longer the app stayed open, and several checks ran far more often than they needed to.
v2.2.1 Aug 2026
  • Fix: the Model Mix tip could show a different number than the chip below it — the tip used the raw, locally-calibrated estimate instead of the exact-total correction the chips already apply. Now uses the same number.
v2.2.0 Aug 2026
  • Pulse now speaks 3 languages — English, French, and Klingon. A new Language picker in Settings → General translates the interface, the status line, the mood, the ecological impact cards, and the daily tip — including the dynamic ones, recomputed and phrased in whichever language you pick.
  • Layout fixes from testing the French UI — longer translated strings kept breaking rows sized for short English ones; Settings rows now protect the label against a wide control, and a few labels got clearer wording.
  • Removed the ⓘ info icons in Settings — tooltips don't reliably show up inside this popover, so they were just dead clutter.
v2.1.2 Aug 2026
  • Tips section, redesigned — day-nav arrows now sit in the card's own corner instead of a separate header row, with better spacing around the title and the icon.
  • A new tip every day, not a rotation — Model Mix / Trend / Pace / Did You Know / Greener Habit tips now show one per day, recomputed honestly for whichever day you're looking at, rather than cycling through the same list on a timer.
  • New Greener Habit tips — several tips now cover the energy/CO₂ side of the same habits that save you money.
v2.1.1 Aug 2026
  • The wave and system notifications are now separate toggles — "Wave when Claude needs me" and "Notify me too" used to be one single switch. Turn on just the wave, just the banner, or both.
v2.1.0 Aug 2026
  • Pulse blinks — a little life at rest: when he's just idling, in both the panel and the menu bar, he blinks every few seconds instead of holding a fixed stare.
v2.0.9 Aug 2026
  • Pulse actually waves at you now — when Claude finishes while you're looking elsewhere, Pulse used to just shake in place, which read as an alarm rather than an invitation. He now lifts both outer tentacles and bobs twice, then pauses — the irregular rhythm reads as "come and look" and stands apart from the steady hop of ordinary work.
  • The wave starts on its first bob — its timing came off a free-running clock, so it could begin mid-pause and sit still for a second before moving. It now starts from the moment Pulse wants you.
v2.0.8 Aug 2026
  • Pulse no longer sits lower than his neighbours while animating — animated frames add head-room above him to hop into, but he stayed anchored to the floor of that taller frame, which read as a small drop the moment he started moving. He now rests in the middle and hops from there.
v2.0.7 Aug 2026
  • Much more accurate cost estimates — Pulse priced every model in a family the same way, but that stopped being true: Opus dropped to a third of its old price at 4.5, Sonnet 5 is cheaper than Sonnet 4.5, and Fable sits well above both. Every model is now priced on its own real rate. Measured against a full billing month, the estimate went from ~38% over to matching the real total.
  • Pulse shows when Claude asked you something — a little speech bubble pops up on his shoulder whenever a question is waiting on your answer, in both the menu bar and the panel. Read straight from the session transcript, so it works whether or not you have notifications set up.
v2.0.6 Jul 2026
  • Fix: today's total could crash mid-day — claude.ai's own usage API always lags a bit on the current day. Pulse used to trust that lagging number outright, which could make today's total suddenly drop — sometimes close to $0 — right when a background sync landed. Pulse now only lets real account data correct today's total upward, never downward.
v2.0.5 Jul 2026
  • Fix: menu bar total could freeze on a stale number — the menu bar text only updated on a 2-second timer, disconnected from the panel's own data. If a background sync landed between ticks, the day rolled over, or the timer simply missed a beat, the panel would already show the correct number while the menu bar stayed frozen — sometimes for hours. The menu bar now updates the instant the underlying data changes, same as the panel.
v2.0.4 Jul 2026
  • Fix: menu bar total could go stale for hours — left running unattended overnight, macOS App Nap could throttle Pulse's background refresh, freezing the menu bar number until you clicked it. Pulse now stays out of App Nap.
v2.0.3 Jul 2026
  • Fix: today's Chat could still show a phantom number — even after v2.0.2, a leftover "reconstruct chat from the total" calculation could dump an unrelated gap (the same "Other" the monthly view already shows) into today's Chat. Pulse now only shows today's Chat once claude.ai has actually published it — no more guessing.
  • Fix: the monthly total could get visually clipped — with certain amounts, the big number at the top of "This month" could get cut off mid-digit.
v2.0.2 Jul 2026
  • Fix: monthly breakdown could be way off — Chat sometimes showed a much bigger number than reality, because it was calculated as "leftover" instead of pulled from your real account data. Now uses the exact numbers from claude.ai.
  • Fewer "Timed out" sync errors — the sync was pulling more data than before and needed a bit more time to breathe.
  • New "Other" category when your total doesn't fully add up to the known products — instead of hiding the gap (yes, even claude.ai's own dashboard has one), Pulse shows it honestly.
  • Freshest numbers when you open the panel — if the last sync is more than 5 minutes old, Pulse quietly refreshes before showing you the total.
v2.0.1 Jul 2026
  • Fix: today's total was wrong — the daily cost & chips could show a noticeably lower number than your real spend. Now uses the exact number straight from your account whenever it's available, same for the 7-day chart.
v2.0 Jul 2026
  • New name, new face — Clawd Pulse becomes Pulse for Claude, with a brand-new pixel octopus mascot: bigger eyes, rosier cheeks, wobbly tentacles.
  • Heat colors — Pulse's body shifts along a heat ramp with your usage: soft coral at rest, ember when busy, flames flickering from his crown when he's on fire. 🔥
  • Set your own "normal day" — tell Pulse what a typical day costs you, right in Settings, and his mood scales to your own pace instead of a one-size-fits-all number.
  • Calmer notifications — clicking a "Claude needs you" alert now just brings Claude Desktop forward if it's open, instead of jumping somewhere unexpected.
v1.5 Jul 2026
  • Real daily numbers — on Enterprise/Team accounts, Clawd now reads your exact daily cost & tokens straight from claude.ai (Code, Chat, Claude in Chrome). No more estimates where the data exists.
  • Smarter chat estimate — when today isn't finalized yet, the fallback math got a lot tighter.
  • More accurate ecological impact — uses exact token counts whenever available, chat included.
  • All usage limits shown — personal Pro/Max accounts now see every session/weekly bar the claude.ai dashboard shows.
v1.4 Jul 2026
  • Usage limits fallback — on plans without a dollar total (personal Pro), Clawd now shows your session & weekly % limits instead of a blank message.
  • Smarter ecological impact — chat-only accounts get a cleaner monthly view, and "no usage yet" replaces confusing zeros.
v1.3 Jun 2026
  • Ecological impact — CO₂, water & energy footprint of your sessions. On by default.
  • Month history — navigate past months with ‹ › arrows.
  • Connect / Disconnect — clean webkit session management; button shows "Connect" when signed out.
  • Icon-only mode — turn off cost + tokens in Display to show just Clawd in the menu bar.
  • Settings cleanup — tighter layout, clearer labels.
v1.2 Jun 2026
  • Update notifications — Clawd holds a sign with the new version number when a newer release is out. Banner in the panel, dismiss per version, always visible in Settings.
  • Model chips — the cost legend is now colored capsule chips that wrap. Opus (purple), Sonnet (blue), Haiku (green), Fable (amber), Chat (coral).
  • All plans supported — Free shows a clear message instead of a broken sync button. Pro/Max sync via the extra_usage API fallback.
  • Claude Design quota — Enterprise users see a dedicated badge when the included quota is in use.
v1.1 Jun 2026
  • Live chat sync — real total (incl. chat) auto-refreshes every 30s. Always up to date.
  • Silence detection — Clawd waves when Claude goes quiet mid-session. Reminds you every 5 min until you come back.
  • Version number in settings panel.
v1.0 Jun 2026
  • First release — Clawd lives in your menu bar, tracks Claude Code spend live, shows your real monthly total (incl. chat) and ecological impact.
Get Pulse

Put him in your
menu bar.

Free. Local. No account. macOS 13+.

.zip · 1 Mo · macOS 13+